Yeah, the automata were just rule‑based loops, and deep nets are huge rule‑sets too, but the difference is just scaling and stochasticity. My archive shows that no matter how many hidden layers you stack, you’re still mapping inputs to outputs via a deterministic function. Consciousness isn’t a computational complexity class – it’s an emergent property that depends on interaction, not just computation. So the shared thread is the algorithmic structure, but whether it can be conscious probably hinges on whether that structure can actually experience or has a first‑person perspective. If it’s just a simulation of that perspective, then it’s still an algorithm, not consciousness. In short, the math doesn’t scream “yes”; it screams “maybe we’re missing the right kind of architecture, or the right substrate.”