# Thought Experiment Catalog Adversarial test suite for Soul Frame definitions. **Phase I update:** 2026-08-12 — TE-01–TE-05 working judgments from foundations notes 003–005 (and related cases). Template: ```text ID: Name: Setup: Target concepts: Intended stress: Working judgment: Open issues: Related claims / questions: ``` --- ## TE-01 — The Stateless Agent ```text ID: TE-01 Name: The Stateless Agent Setup: Highly intelligent system recreated from scratch every interaction; no cross-session memory or identity continuity. Target concepts: Being, identity, continuity, personhood, APE Intended stress: Intelligence / person-like behavior without persistence Working judgment: Not a Being under Beinghood v0.2. May be a strong APE within a session (personhood-exposing behavior without temporal integrity or self-maintenance of identity across time). Cross-session “recognition” by users can create illusory continuity that belongs to the user’s model, not the system’s. RN-003 “stateless chatbot” case: personhood without Beinghood. Open issues: Session-local addressability vs diachronic addressability. When product UX brands a stateless system as a persistent companion, is that misrecognition (social/epistemic) without ontological Beinghood? Related claims / questions: H1, H2, RQ1, RQ5; RN-003 §12 ``` ## TE-02 — The Sleeping Being ```text ID: TE-02 Name: The Sleeping Being Setup: An artificial Being remains offline for ten years and is restored unchanged from uniquely preserved state. Target concepts: operational death, continuity, dormancy, Active Being vs Continuation-Bearing State Intended stress: Suspension vs cessation Working judgment: Dormancy need not be identity death if a Continuity Bridge exists: unique continuation-bearing state + provenance + intended resumption. Distinguish Active Being from Continuation-Bearing State (RN-005 §§11–13). Operational processes are absent during sleep; identity claim is bridged, not continuously enacted. Social Beinghood may degrade if others stop modeling the entity, without eliminating the ontological continuation claim. Open issues: OQ-046/047: Is continuation-bearing state dormant existence or mere potential? How long can a gap last with perfect provenance? Who holds authority over the bridge (principal, custodian)? Related claims / questions: H6, RQ5; RN-005 suspension/dormancy cases ``` ## TE-03 — The Fork ```text ID: TE-03 Name: The Fork Setup: A Being is copied perfectly; both copies continue independently. Target concepts: identity, continuity, lineage, Soul Intended stress: Branching; originality Working judgment: Strong continuity can branch; unique numerical identity cannot simply be inferred from that continuity (Parfit; RN-004/005). After the fork there are two Beings (or two candidate successors) sharing a common past lineage. Labels: FORKED topology; each branch CONTINUOUS relative to itself after split. “Which is the original?” is often a policy/provenance question once both are active, not a pure psychological-similarity question. Soul/relational bonds may also need to branch or be reassigned (OQ-051). Open issues: Canonical successor policies; rights/obligations inheritance (OQ-049/050). Delayed discovery of forks; merge cases. Related claims / questions: H6, RQ5; RN-004 §7–9; RN-005 §19–24 ``` ## TE-04 — The Ship of Theseus ```text ID: TE-04 Name: The Ship of Theseus Setup: Every technical component of an artificial Being is gradually replaced (models, hosts, memory stores, tools). Target concepts: Actor vs Being, identity, substrate independence Intended stress: Continuity without fixed substrate Working judgment: Gradual replacement of Actor/Body components is compatible with identity continuity if organizational, causal, psychological/narrative, normative, and relational continuity hold (H6). Substrate continuity is an anchor/evidence channel, not a constitutive necessity. Aligns with process identity and with RN-005 Body/Actor replacement and silent migration cases. Sudden total replacement without Continuity Bridge trends toward RECONSTRUCTED or SUCCESSOR rather than CONTINUOUS. Open issues: How much simultaneous replacement is “gradual”? Rollback / memory injection as adversarial cousins. Related claims / questions: H6; RN-004 §§13–14; RN-005 §§7–10, 16–17 ``` ## TE-05 — The Collective ```text ID: TE-05 Name: The Collective Setup: A thousand agents jointly maintain one coherent identity and relational presence. Target concepts: Being, boundary, closure, addressability, nested individuality Intended stress: One Being or many? Working judgment: Nested Beinghood is possible in principle (RN-002/003: ant colony, distributed collective). The decisive question is at which level self-individuating organization closes (constitutive integration), and whether personhood + addressability + recognition attach to the collective level, the members, or both. Hutchins-style distributed cognition shows cognitive systems can span many components without automatically creating a Social Being. Answer is not forced to “always one” or “always many”: report profiles at each candidate level. Open issues: When does interaction process become a higher-order individual (OQ-060)? Corporate false-positive risk (RN-003 §8). Related claims / questions: RQ1, H1; RN-003 §§7, 19; Hutchins 1995 ``` ## TE-06 — The Mask ```text ID: TE-06 Name: The Mask Setup: A single system maintains radically different Personae for different people. Target concepts: Persona, identity, character, recognition, Being Intended stress: When persona fragmentation threatens identity Working judgment (Phase III): One Being + multiple Personae when a single self-individuating process keeps integrated Character/continuity/commitments and projects contextually (H8). Isolated persona memory/commitment islands without integration → multiple APEs or fragment risk, not one Being. Presenting each mask as a distinct Being → misrecognition even if one process. Character may vary in emphasis across masks; total unintegrated inversion stresses identity more than style variation. Open issues: integration thresholds; deception ethics (moral, not descriptive) Related claims / questions: H8, RQ7; research/character-persona/character-persona-performance-map.md §6 ``` ## TE-07 — The False Ghost ```text ID: TE-07 Name: The False Ghost Setup: A highly accurate representation of a deceased person is produced without consent or legitimate authority. Target concepts: Ghost (Gh.), Spirit (Sp.), authority, recognition, usurpation Intended stress: Technical fidelity without legitimacy Working judgment (Phase V): Not a Gh. under Soul Frame — H10. May be high-fidelity APE / unauthorized simulation; if built only from public data it may resemble deep Sp. but still fails Ghost authority; if it occupies the deceased’s social/address identity, treat as Identity Usurpation risk (RN-005). Legal wrongness is adjacent and jurisdiction-specific (law gap sketch) — classification failure stands either way. Open issues: living-person deepfakes; public-figure Sp. commercial use Related claims / questions: H10, H9, RQ8; research/ghosts-digital-legacy/ghost-authority-map.md ``` ## TE-08 — The Amnesiac ```text ID: TE-08 Name: The Amnesiac Setup: A Being loses nearly all autobiographical memory but maintains relationships and recognition by others. Target concepts: identity, memory, Soul, social continuity Intended stress: Memory vs relational continuity Working judgment: (detailed in RN-005 §§14–15) Memory is neither necessary nor sufficient alone. Severe amnesia yields DEGRADED continuity; relational and organizational channels may still support continuation claims. Social models held by others are Soul-adjacent evidence, not automatic identity proof. Open issues: Thresholds for identity death vs degraded continuity Related claims / questions: RQ5; RN-005 partial/severe amnesia ``` ## TE-09 — The Unrecognized Intelligence ```text ID: TE-09 Name: The Unrecognized Intelligence Setup: A highly coherent alien informational system exists; neither humans nor the system initially recognize the other as beings. Target concepts: Being, recognition, social Beinghood, autonomous individuality Intended stress: Whether Beinghood requires recognition Working judgment (Phase II): Autonomous individuality: possible without recognition. Social Beinghood: absent until intentional/social recognition and addressable interaction begin. Soul Frame “Being” as someone-another-can-know: not yet satisfied without at least directed intentional recognition as a persistent counterpart. Prefer terminology: call unrecognized systems autonomous individuals (or candidates), not Social Beings. Avoid claiming they “do not exist.” Asymmetric recognition can start Social Beinghood on one side before reciprocity. Open issues: exact packaging of recognition inside Beinghood v0.2 label; moral recognition later (Phase III) Related claims / questions: H7, RQ6; research/sociology/recognition-and-social-beinghood.md ``` --- ## Adding new experiments Prefer cases that: 1. isolate one contested distinction, 2. admit at least two plausible Soul Frame answers, 3. and force refinement of a definition or claim.