Persistence Without a Self: The Structure of What a Relation Leaves

Fifth paper in the Consciousness series. A relation, while it runs, modulates its participants, and the modulation persists in them after the relation has stopped running. This persisting modulation (trace-affect) is grounded in the framework's ontology: that exchange leaves permanent, non-retrievable marks follows from entropic asymmetry, non-return, and viscosity (the commitments from which the corpus already derives trace-leaving and register). Its further character is developed from the same commitments: traces are cumulative and plural; they are maintained by whatever process continues to reproduce their specification, and they fade — by dilution, not erasure — when no process does. Trace-affect is distinct in kind from a persisting substantial self: it is non-separable and plural where the reified reading is separable and singular, and it accounts natively for the attenuation the substance-reading must accommodate by addition. The distinction is argued as parsimony, not proof. The paper states the claim, derives what is derivable, marks what is application, and issues no verdict on presence.