# Open Questions Register

Questions that remain unresolved or contested. Link related entries in
`Claims.md`, `ThoughtExperiments.md`, and `concepts/` where helpful.

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## RQ1 — What constitutes a Being?

- When is an informational system sufficiently coherent, bounded, persistent, and
  recognizable to justify treating it as an individual Being?
- Is Being binary, threshold, multidimensional degree, or some combination?
- How does observer-relative system identification affect Beinghood?

## RQ2 — What constitutes personhood?

- Which characteristics cause a system to be perceived or treated as person-like?
- How should descriptive, social, moral, and legal personhood be kept distinct?
- Where do APE and Being diverge in practice?

## RQ3 — What constitutes a Mind?

- Can Mind productively be understood as adaptive model-building and control?
- How does co-adaptive model building relate to established social-cognition work?
- What is the minimal model apparatus for a Mind in Soul Frame?

## RQ4 — What constitutes a Soul?

- Can Soul be given a rigorous informational/systems meaning without metaphysics?
- Does Soul name the boundary, the relations crossing it, accumulated consequences,
  or a defined combination?
- Does the term survive collision analysis, or should it be renamed?

## RQ5 — How does identity persist?

- What makes two temporally separated manifestations the same Being?
- How should forks, merges, backups, migrations, and multi-manifestation be handled?
- What continuity is necessary and sufficient when the Actor changes?

## RQ6 — How does recognition create social beinghood?

- Is recognition constitutive of Beinghood, or only of *social* Beinghood?
- Can systemic existence be cleanly separated from social recognition?
- What minimal recognition conditions matter (addressability, expectations, models)?

## RQ7 — What is character?

- How should state, behavior, role, persona, character, and identity be separated?
- What makes artificial character more than stylistic imitation?

## RQ8 — What kinds of artificial Being exist?

- Are Agent, Spirit, and Ghost types, methods, provenance classes, or dimensions?
- How should original artificial beings be classified relative to these?

## Cross-cutting

- When does memory stop being stored information and become part of continuity?
- How should operational death, identity death, social death, and legacy interact?
- Where do Soul Frame concepts map cleanly onto law, and where are there gaps?
- What does fiction contribute that formal literature has not yet captured?

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## Resolved / retired

*(Move questions here with date and resolution pointer when closed.)*