Persons Without a Global Self: Personhood and Diachronic Persistence as Record-Internal, Specification-Relative Continuity-Invariances in a Consistency-Constrained Information History

The agency and normative arc of this series - Action (23), Autonomy (24), Responsibility (25), Collective Responsibility (26), and Value (27) - reached a subject that acts, owns, answers, bears allocated responsibility, and appraises norms; but each paper consumed its bearer - the persisting subject whose lineage, answerability, allocation, and norm-standing it tracked - as a declared, contestable input, forwarding the bearer's persistence and identity to here. This paper takes up that debt without a global self: a subsystem jointly possessing complete unity over all of a person's states, strict substantial persistence, privileged complete self-access, sole authorship, and finality over every "same person?" question. Personhood is reconstructed as grounded but not substantial. A person is the persisting bearer of the series' standings (observer-hood, agenthood, answerability, norm-standing) whose persistence over time is a continuity-invariance of the record across its time-indexed perspectives under a declared person specification Pi_P - the diachronic lift of the series' objectivity-as-invariance (Paper 15), law-as-invariance (Paper 17), and norm-as-invariance (Paper 27) machinery, built over the observer-continuation relations Paper 10 supplies. Persistence is non-circular: its input is an already record-bearing subsystem, so it grounds graded standing as a continuant, not subjecthood ex nihilo; and because felt or avowed continuity does not entail admissible-family continuity (Cont_act does not imply Cont_adm), a confabulated or manipulated self-narrative does not by itself establish the relevant narrative or psychological-continuity standing. The account is revisionary: it does not scalarize numerical identity (an equivalence relation) but replaces the all-or-nothing "same person?" question with a graded persistence/continuation standing that is specification-relative, corrigible, and can be admissibly indeterminate; what is graded is standing as a continuer or survivor, never numerical identity itself. Two results organize the account. R-A (Continuity-Grounding / No-Global-Self): for an admissible specification responsive to admissible-family continuity, any non-attributed persistence cell for which responsiveness and a continuity-isolating witness obtain is not a function of any single perspective's first-person avowal - instantiated by an explicit agential-lineage witness, so the person profile as a whole is not a function of the avowal-field - and no bare-substance fact is licensed as an admissible grounding input; personal persistence is neither avowed into being, nor admissibly grounded in a bare substance, nor internally void. R-B (Conditional Underdetermination and Non-Self-Certification): no subject self-certifies its own diachronic persistence standing from inside, and fission, fusion, and gradual replacement can leave the continuer verdict admissibly open, recoverable only up to a specification-relative equivalence class with a typed measure over successors - so the puzzle cases are open cells, not hidden facts licensed or represented by the architecture. An explicit map then grounds, at criterion level, the bearer Papers 23-27 left declared. Personhood is neither admissibly grounded in a bare substance nor internally void: it is corrigible, typed, admissible-continuity invariance reconstructed from inside the history.