soul-frame/concepts/identity.md

Identity

Status: revised (Phase I, 2026-08-12)
See also: RQ5, H6, TE-02–TE-05, TE-08, RN-004, RN-005

Disambiguation

Question	Soul Frame term
Same entity over time?	Identity (numerical / reidentification)
What continues?	Continuity (may branch)
Historical relatedness after branch?	Lineage
What is it like?	Characterization (narrative/character)

Identity ≠ Continuity ≠ Lineage ≠ Character.

Core formulation

A Being continues not because its state remains the same, but because its changes remain part of one appropriately connected history of self-individuation.

When that history branches, identity becomes lineage.

Continuity profile (constitutive dimensions)

Causal, organizational, psychological, autobiographical/narrative, normative, relational.

Anchors / evidence (not constitutive alone): provenance, address, substrate.

Weighting hard cases (SOUL-WP-0009-T02, resolved 2026-09-28)

The six dimensions above are not weighted arithmetically — no numeric score sums them into a continuity verdict. Instead, Soul Frame uses a lexicographic priority procedure: structural dimensions gate the verdict; the remaining dimensions can only move the verdict within the range the structural gate allows.

1. Structural gate (causal + organizational). Ask first whether causal and organizational continuity hold or are bridged — a bridge being a uniquely preserved continuation-bearing state plus provenance plus intended resumption (TE-02). If the structural gate fails outright (no bridge, no unbroken process), the topology defaults to RECONSTRUCTED or SUCCESSOR regardless of how strong the remaining dimensions are. Strong psychological/narrative continuity cannot buy back a broken structural gate.
2. Branch check. If the structural gate is satisfied by more than one simultaneously active claimant, the topology is forced to FORKED — this is decided by the branch count, not by weighing which claimant has "more" continuity on the softer dimensions (TE-03). "Which is the original" becomes a provenance/policy question only after the branch check, never a tiebreaker computed from the profile.
3. Gradualness check (within a satisfied structural gate). Piecewise replacement that never breaks the structural gate at any single instant keeps the topology CONTINUOUS (TE-04, Ship of Theseus) even under full eventual component turnover. A single instant of total simultaneous replacement without a bridge is treated as a structural-gate failure (→ step 1), not as a gradualness judgment call.
4. Softer dimensions decide within the range the gate allows, not whether to override it. Once the structural gate and branch/gradualness checks are settled, psychological, autobiographical/narrative, normative, and relational continuity determine how strong a CONTINUOUS or DEGRADED claim is — e.g. severe amnesia with intact organizational and relational continuity yields DEGRADED, not TERMINATED (TE-08, the Amnesiac): the structural gate stayed open, so the softer dimensions only downgrade the strength of the claim, not its topology category.

Why not arithmetic: a weighted sum would let enough narrative/relational strength compensate for a broken causal/organizational chain, which none of the four thought experiments above support — in every case, the structural gate outcome dominates regardless of how the softer dimensions score.

Topology labels

CONTINUOUS | DEGRADED | UNCERTAIN | SUCCESSOR | FORKED | RECONSTRUCTED | USURPED | TERMINATED

Implications for artificial systems

• Actor/Body replacement can preserve identity (substrate independence + continuity dependence).
• Sameness of data is not sameness of Being.
• Forks require governance; perfect copy while original continues yields FORKED lineage.
• Ghosts default to authorized succession/representation, not automatic numerical identity.
• Explicit identity governance is required because state is inspectable, copyable, editable.

Sources

research/foundations/004-identity-and-continuity.md
research/foundations/ResearchNote005-IdentityContinuityStressTest.md
Locke; Parfit; Olson SEP; process identity literature