This essay asks: Where does the self begin and end, if at all? Not as an abstract puzzle, but as a practical question for ethics, governance, and mental health—especially in a world of synthetic minds and distributed identities.

The old question—“Do non‑human entities have minds?”—usually hides two others: What is a mind? and What evidence would count? In the CaM / GRM framework, a mind is a pattern of ongoing integration under constraint, equipped with memory, self‑model, and the capacity to learn from its own history...