soul-frame/ThoughtExperiments.md

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:

ID:
Name:
Setup:
Target concepts:
Intended stress:
Working judgment:
Open issues:
Related claims / questions:

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TE-01 — The Stateless Agent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.