soul-frame/OpenQuestions.md
tegwick c6a5ee951d Establish Soul Frame research repository and workplans
Scaffold the research layout from the research program, add INTENT/SCOPE,
research instruments, concept stubs, and SOUL-WP-0001–0008 phase workplans.
Register the repo with State Hub under domain agents for hub-synced execution.
2026-08-09 21:38:36 +02:00

2.6 KiB

Open Questions Register

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


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?

Resolved / retired

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