ABSTRACT
Data — Intelligence, Identity, and the Human Baseline
A study of behavioral continuity, remembered commitments, human recognition, and the questions no single test can settle.
PUBLICATION INTEGRITY
Status you can inspect.
- Evidence class
- Conceptual / Interpretive
- Publication type
- Conceptual working paper
- Review status
- Working paper · not peer reviewed
- Current edition
- R3 · Reading edition R4 · Author attribution R5
- Public date
- 2026-09-17
- Register version
- 1.0.0
AI-use disclosure. Partial AI-assisted drafting and editorial preparation. Human authors retain responsibility for scholarly judgment, source verification, interpretation, and final approval. This working paper has not undergone external peer review.
Correction record. No separate correction, withdrawal, or retraction notice is attached to this current public edition.
PUBLICATION SUMMARY
Abstract
Question
What persists when an artificial assistant retains its name but loses memory, changes model, or inherits a copied history? Anchored in The Measure of a Man’s fictional problem of recognition, this paper separates informational continuity, behavioral continuity, role continuity, perceived identity, and numerical identity. No single continuity measure is treated as an answer to personhood or consciousness.
Approach
The constructed museum assistant Maris provides a finite world of tentative titles, project commitments, delegated authority, and authorized revisions. Worked examples contrast a familiar persona with missing commitments against a changed presentation with accurate state. Forked and merged histories expose cases where recalling an event is not sufficient to determine which obligation remains active.
Conceptual contribution
A proposed continuity profile records what survives a specified transformation and for which purpose. Storage, retrieval, use, and correction are distinguished. Stable behavior is not automatically desirable when legitimate updates require change. A branch-aware commitment record preserves provenance and scope without pretending to settle metaphysical identity. Human recognition is studied as a separate phenomenon with its own outcomes, not inferred from technical persistence.
Research agenda
The evaluation independently varies model, memory representation, persona, and update conditions. Full histories, structured ledgers, narrative summaries, and absent memory are compared through factual recall, operative commitments, authorization, and correction. Copying and merging are tested under explicit policies rather than an assumed newest-event rule. Proposed human studies examine reliance and perceived continuity while holding the underlying record constant where possible. Longitudinal tests separate fixed benchmark comparability from newly generated situations and document model and interface versions.
Scope and status
The paper is a conceptual working paper with constructed examples and unrun study proposals. The fictional episode and selected agent research motivate questions; they do not establish the moral or legal status of present systems. Consciousness frameworks are discussed as theory-dependent approaches, not verdicts. The intended contribution is to make identity-related claims precise enough to compare, without reducing all persistence to a name or treating memory as automatic evidence of a self.
INSIDE THE FULL PAPER
Follow the argument.
- The familiar face and the unfamiliar question
- Reading The Measure of a Man without treating fiction as evidence about current AI
- Five continuity questions that should not be compressed into one
- A technical lineage is not the same as a biography
- The fictional assistant and its commitment ledger
- Memory availability, retrieval, and use are separate boundaries
- Model change and memory change should be manipulated independently
- A continuity matrix makes trade-offs visible
- Forking exposes a limit of simple sameness language
- Merging records is not the same as sharing an experience
- Commitment continuity includes release, revision, and completion
- Style can persist while the role disappears
- Self-reports of memory and identity need external checks
- Reflection and memory rewriting are interventions, not automatic maturation
- A worked example separates recall from commitment handling
- A worked example separates perceived sameness from operational sameness
- Causal continuity and constitutive identity are different arguments
- Consciousness uncertainty should neither inflate nor erase the evidence
- Recognition has descriptive and normative dimensions
- Human reliance can outlast the continuity that justified it
- Intentional forgetting can be part of trustworthy continuity
- Multiple users complicate the idea of one stable role
- Longitudinal study requires both fixed tests and new situations
- Measurement reliability is part of the identity problem
- A proposed factorial study of model and memory continuity
- A separate study of recognition must not borrow the behavioral study's conclusions
- Objections, limits, and alternative interpretations
- Conclusion: continuity is a profile before it is a verdict
- Appendix: a continuity record for a forked commitment
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