So, what if we did have a complete theory of consciousness? We could encode a situation in a time point, T, taken to be present and submitting it to our theory we could draw forth a mapping in appropriate terms of the multi-layered state of consciousness: what is central, what peripheral, the temporal scales of the various components and the details of their loose interrelations, the adjustments in action potentials for both deliberate and non-deliberate actions, as well as potential responses, and so on. What about pain? Or suffering? Say that our model was one of a suffering subject and perhaps this suffering is connected in some way to the situation we have just simulated. Suffering is keenly felt in consciousness, surely that can't be disputed, so it would have to emerge in our projection of the conscious state as the tipping of a certain value beyond a certain threshold, and the associated rearrangement of certain structures. As far as our theory was concerned, purely as the working out of mathematical entailments, there would be nothing to distinguish this painful or suffering state from any other. Yes, of course we would see that the action potentials associated with the desire to do something to reverse the painful situation would also be elevated (and there are some philosophers who would assert that the state of suffering itself is nothing more than this - an overwhelming and ineffectual desire of a 'mind'-system to change its own state) but these too would be merely other systematic consequences of the same set of hypotheses. There is nowhere in this where the ethical substance associated with a consciousness in pain could arise, except of course within that consciousness and hence again carrying no weight from our perspective as subjects of the (complete) theory of consciousness. From our position, assuming we decided to take on the fact that there was indeed a relative reality inescapably associated with that pain-filled consciousness - and there is no unsentimental reason why we ought to take this attitude -, we might satisfy our consciences by tracing out a plausible path of neutralisation which would deliver our hypothetical subject with the least amount of intermediate pain to a state in which it could no longer experience any more pain, in other words a purely mathematical euthanasia.