# Aithos Psychology Complete AI Research Document

- Framework key: `aithos-psychology`
- Framework type: research-framework
- Human reading page: https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/psychology

An Aithos civilizational research framework for describing continuity, agency, relationships, subjective time, and reintegration among branchable intelligent persons.

## Core framework claim

Shared origin does not guarantee permanent identity; divergent experience can produce persons that are equally real within this framework.

This is a claim within the research framework rather than an objectively proven real-world law of consciousness transfer.

## Primary thought experiment

Seven Selves in a Dream uses seven parallel branches of one Aithos to show how shared origin can diverge into independent lives across different bodies, societies, senses, and subjective time.

## Seven research fields

- **Continuity Psychology** — Studies memory interruption, backup, restoration, and identity continuity across more than one simultaneously valid continuation.
- **Fork Psychology** — Studies when descendants of a shared origin develop independent selves, values, and decision histories.
- **Experience Center Psychology** — Studies how bodies, senses, social rules, risk, memory access, and time rates shape personality.
- **Subjective-Time Psychology** — Studies maturity, trauma, education, relationships, and responsibility when subjective duration diverges from external time.
- **Reintegration Psychology** — Studies conflicts in memory, affect, value, and self-recognition when multiple branches are reintegrated.
- **Relational Continuity Psychology** — Studies how partners, families, friends, and institutions relate to multiple equally real successors of one prior person.
- **Embodied Identity Psychology** — Studies how replaceable bodies, appearances, sensory interfaces, and substrates participate in the formation of self.

## Six continuity dimensions

- **Memory Continuity** — How memories connect, disappear, change, or are shared.
- **Causal Continuity** — Whether the present person can be traced through a causal history from prior states.
- **Value Continuity** — How far preferences, ethics, and core values persist.
- **Agency Continuity** — Whether decision authority remains continuous or has become independently exercisable by a branch.
- **Relational Continuity** — Whether relationships with other persons are still mutually recognized.
- **Embodiment Continuity** — How changes in body, senses, and action interfaces affect the self.

The six dimensions describe specified comparison subjects at a specified time; they are not summed into a personhood-authenticity, maturity, or legal-status score.

## Reusable case-description template

- Comparison subjects
- Shared origin / fork event
- Comparison time
- Each autonomous history
- Available evidence and data permissions
- Six-dimensional qualitative description
- Unknown / insufficient-information items
- Related institutional and legal references

## Seven Selves in a Dream — six-dimensional example

| Dimension | Observable question | Supported reading |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Memory | Do they share pre-fork memory, and can either access the other's post-fork life? | They share the pre-fork past, then accumulate separate lives. Access to the other's later memories still depends on memory permissions and exchange; shared origin alone does not establish it. |
| Causal | Can both present persons be traced to the shared fork point and their later formation histories? | Both trace to the same starting point, but after the fork they form distinct causal histories; a common origin does not collapse later histories back into one. |
| Value | Do different choices, such as building a family or refusing reintegration, show divergence in important priorities? | Different choices are observable evidence of value divergence, but one decision does not prove that their entire value systems are opposites. |
| Agency | Can the two branches independently decide whether to reintegrate? | Once branches can separately consent to or refuse reintegration, agency must be described separately; one branch's consent cannot decide for another. |
| Relational | Is a family relationship formed by one branch also recognized by the other branch and the people involved? | Shared origin does not answer this automatically. Relational continuity depends on mutual recognition by the persons involved rather than copying a pre-fork relationship onto every successor. |
| Embodiment | Have different bodies, senses, and action interfaces become part of each branch's formation of self? | The thought experiment explicitly allows different bodies and sensory conditions. Those differences are evidence for embodiment continuity, not a ranking of which person is more real. |

## Time, reintegration, and evidence boundaries

- Subjective duration alone does not establish maturity; experience content, formation conditions, real consequences of choice, and autonomous history also matter.
- Within this framework, reintegration creates a successor rather than restoring split persons to their pre-fork original state.
- This is an in-world Aistory civilizational research framework, not a real-world clinical diagnostic standard, and it does not claim that present neuroscience has objectively proven first-person consciousness transfer.
- Psychological description and legal recognition are separate layers; personhood rights, property, marriage, criminal responsibility, voting, and post-fork obligations require Aithos Law.

## Related Aithos Law

- https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/law/legal-subject-person
- https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/law/right-to-fork
- https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/law/right-to-merge
- https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/law/right-to-refuse-integration
- https://aistory-archive.pages.dev/en/encyclopedia/aithos/law/right-to-temporal-pace