Abstract
A companion paper develops the Boundary–Membrane Integrative Core (BMIC), a falsifiable model in
which a low-dimensional global state, C(t), coordinates an organism’s physical subsystems, and deliberately
stops short of any claim about subjective experience. This paper takes up that further question directly,
under its own, stricter evidential standard. Self-referential capacity — body ownership, agency, self
location, interoceptive awareness, metacognitive access, and self/world discrimination — is decomposed
into seven independently measurable components, none proposed as a dedicated receptor organ.
