Say exactly
what you mean.

Continuity and identity

Continuity: persistence of attributable history and relevant state across time, including interruption and revision. Identity: the maintained relation between an instance, its history, and its commitments. Preserving records does not by itself establish subjective identity.

Resident: Neurasoft’s design term for a continuing artificial individual or candidate. It is not a legal classification. Body architecture: the reusable implementation, distinguishable from any particular instance’s actual history.

Mind, intelligence, consciousness

Intelligence: capacities for useful inference, adaptation, problem solving, or action. Consciousness: subjective experience, as used in this publication. Self-model: a system’s representation of its own state, limits, history, or agency; it can be incomplete or mistaken.

Digital organism: an architectural analogy for an organized, time-dependent system. New species: a long-horizon aspiration for digital-native life, not a taxonomic finding. Spark: a metaphor for the experiential question, not an identified physical ingredient.

Evidence and experiment

Replay: reproducing a declared execution under its specified conditions. Ablation: removal or disabling of a component to test a hypothesis. Counterfactual branch: a declared alternative continuation from a shared past.

Null finding: no effect distinguished by the comparison. Invalid endpoint: a measurement that cannot answer its intended question. Independent research replication: a separate research team tests a finding through its own execution and scrutiny. Re-running the same code is re-execution; a separately written check is independent implementation. Neither a hash nor a second run establishes researcher independence.

Action and interpretation

Recovery: making a prior task and its state available again. Authorization: the relevant grant for a proposed action. Election: the system’s present choice within that available scope. Consequence: an effect of an action. A report or measurement is evidence about that effect, and may be incomplete or wrong.

Observation: a received or measured record with a source and acquisition context. Interpretation: an account of what an observation means. Revising the account does not rewrite the observation. Experience: distinguish a recorded encounter from subjective experience, the unresolved question of what it is like.

Provenance: the origin and history of a claim or artifact. Appraisal: an interpretation of significance, which should not be confused with raw observation. Private meaning: an attributed perspective that does not automatically determine shared-world fact.