A self can sleep without the world. It cannot live there forever.
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Early versions of this argument described migration with one dial: how much of the thinking is happening in the new substrate?
That was the wrong number of dials.
A self is not only computation. It is a boundary. A boundary is where the world reaches the system and where the system reaches the world. So migration has to move two things, not one.
The first is interface: sensing and acting, the actual coupling to the world.
The second is inference: the predicting, modelling, updating, remembering, and interpreting that make the world navigable from a point of view.
Both have to migrate to transfer selfhood. But they do not have to migrate in perfect synchrony.
The real constraint is that inference can’t be left indefinitely uncoupled from any interface, lest it slide into obsolescence and, eventually, dissolution.
A predictor is not a predictor in the abstract.
It predicts something. Its guesses are usually scored against some stream of signal. Its map is a map because it has been coupled to a territory. Cut the coupling, and the map does not instantly vanish. It may retain structure, memory, style, preference, and point of view for a while. It may even keep running.
So the claim is not that a self without an interface immediately stops being a self.
The claim is that a self without any actual or recoverable interface cannot participate in sustaining itself. It cannot test its predictions against what hosts it. It cannot act on the conditions of its own continuation. It cannot correct its boundary by exchanging with a world.
If computation migrates into a new layer while the world still reaches the self mainly through the old biological interface, then the new layer may be important without yet being the main place where the perspective lives. It may be a model, assistant, archive, or personal neocortex in the cloud. The physical body may still be the primary route through which the world appears and through which the self acts back.
If that body is then lost, the question is not whether the self disappears at once. The question is what kind of maintenance situation remains.
The key distinction is not hosted versus unhosted. Nothing Is Unhosted already removed that false contrast. Every finite self is hosted by an environment. The issue is whether the system still participates in maintaining the boundary whose failure would be its loss.
A self might survive the loss of the old body as a save state, as an inward dream, as a virtual person, or as a process temporarily kept alive by caretakers. None of those states is automatically non-self. But if no actual or recoverable world-channel remains, the self has been removed from the loop by which it can participate in its own continuation. It is being maintained wholly from outside, or living on borrowed time. It is no longer an actor in its world.