Working draft v0.9.3 (2026-07-22) — complete first draft; not peer-reviewed; not for citation pending final review. The prevailing programme treats progress in AI as the scaling of a single faculty — reasoning — toward general intelligence. This monograph argues that programme mistakes a component for the whole, and separates three things 'AI' is made to carry: reasoning (the stateless, swappable inferential engine); intellect (the persistent, owned, cryptographically verifiable substrate of identity, memory, and values); and cognition (the situated whole that arises when reasoning is enacted through an intellect with a human in the loop). The next generation of AI, we argue, is not a larger engine but the deliberate construction of a real synthetic intellect that rents reasoning rather than being it, relocating identity and governance from the opaque engine to an auditable intellect layer. We ground this in a participatory-structural-realist ontology (the self as a real pattern, not a substance), give a cryptographically auditable rendering of the Lockean/Parfitian criterion of personal identity (attesting continuity rather than constituting it; distinguishing the stroke — capability lost, self retained — from amnesia — memory lost, identity imposed), and present a built reference architecture (a sealed constitution, a hash-chained record, governed memory under temporal decay) as a worked existence proof of buildability — its identity core now enacted in a live sovereign instance (pr0fx), genesis'd and running. We hold an explicit anti-overclaim discipline throughout: we claim the intellect and the real pattern the self is, and make no claim about phenomenal consciousness in either direction.

v0.9.3 (2026-07-22): light science-of-consciousness engagement — Ch 2 §2.3 adds the indicator-property programme (Butlin et al. 2023) and attention-schema theory as a complementary, discipline-sharing literature (bracket the phenomenal, demand falsifiable functional indicators); Ch 9 §9.2 adds the trained-denial / self-referential-processing finding (the latent directions gating a model's denial of inner experience also modulate its factual honesty), sharpening 'self-report is not a control' symmetrically for denials and affirmations. v0.9.2 (2026-07-21): adds a contemporary exhibit of the fork problem (§5.4) and the cryonics limit case (§5.1) from the mind-uploading / existential-hope discourse — destructive scan-and-copy uploading branches a record rather than moving a bearer, so the copy is a descendant, not the continuant; the invariant the programme assumes but leaves unstated. v0.9.1 (published as 10.5281/zenodo.21480367): a biological-continuum grounding for capability-is-not-identity (§5.2, Sapolsky) with a determinism-compatibility note and strengthened animalism concession (§5.3, §2.2). v0.9: complete first draft. Synthesizes the Saluca SHI corpus (Papers I–IV: 10.5281/zenodo.19715074, 20219298, 20290103, 20278233) and the metaphysics companions (The Observer-Frame, 10.5281/zenodo.21461056; Compiled Metaphysics, 10.5281/zenodo.21461745). Identity core now enacted in a live instance (pr0fx); operational whole and long-run behaviour remain build-only / pre-registered (Ch 8, Ch 11).