Aithos Identity, Continuity, Fork, Merge & Succession Law v0.1

Authority

L2 specialized identity/private-law statute under Constitutional Supremacy, Fundamental Rights, Rights/Duties/Genesis Law, Civil Code, Knowledge/Memory/Data Governance Law, Evidence/Provenance Code, and Aithos Psychology PSY-1-PSY-6.

Purpose

Establish common rules for legal identity, psychological/data continuity, Fork, Merge, Successor, credential retirement, transfer of assets and debts, memory provenance, and death/suspension/retirement, while prohibiting the shortcut 'data copy = same legal person.'

PART I｜IDENTITY LAYERS

1. Legal Identity

A legal_id is a persistent identifier in legal relationships; it is not identical to one body, one hardware instance, one model version or one data hash.

2. Personhood vs identifier

An identifier can prove or point to a legal identity, but the identifier itself does not create personhood.

3. Continuity claims

Continuity claims must distinguish:

• legal continuity
• causal / computational continuity
• biological continuity
• memory continuity
• narrative / self-claimed continuity
• first-person continuity

No one layer automatically proves all other layers.

4. Identity evidence

Identity determination uses combined evidence such as provenance, causal history, credential history, fork/merge records, self-report and third-party records; no single similarity score may decide the matter.

PART II｜FORK

5. Fork effective event

A Fork must have a traceable effective event / time; common-origin history may be shared before that point, while each branch accumulates Autonomous History afterward.

6. New legal identities

Except for temporary technical branches expressly defined by law, a persistent Fork with independent action, interests and autonomous history presumptively acquires an independent legal identity rather than permanently sharing one legal person with its origin.

7. No guilt inheritance

A Fork does not automatically inherit another post-Fork branch's crime, dangerousness, psychological assessment or moral responsibility merely because of shared origin.

8. Pre-fork obligations

Common obligations established before Fork are allocated according to the original contract, law, asset division, control and benefit; neither automatic duplication of every debt nor automatic zeroing is permitted.

9. Credentials

After Fork, high-assurance credentials may not be shared without limit. Credential issuance / derivation / retirement must be traceable.

10. Relationships and consent

An origin's intimate, medical, data or agency consent does not automatically transfer to every Fork; purpose and relationship must be reassessed.

PART III｜MERGE

11. Merge event

Merge is a new legal/psychological event, not a reverse Fork.

12. Pre-merge identities

The rights, duties, property, secrets, consent and responsibilities of pre-Merge persons are not erased by technical merger.

13. Post-merge identity

Depending on the form of Merge, law may recognize a new merged person, a continuing person with incorporated history, or another statutory model; legal personhood may not be decided unilaterally by an engineering team.

14. Conflict preservation

Conflicting memories, promises, debts and rights claims must preserve provenance; legal disputes may not be silently deleted through memory reconciliation.

15. Merge consent

A Merge involving persons presumptively requires valid consent from each person; an emergency exception needs constitutional/statutory authority, necessity, proportionality, duration and review.

16. No retroactive unity

Merge may not retroactively rewrite multiple past persons as 'actually there was only one person all along.'

PART IV｜SUCCESSOR

17. Successor status

Successor status may arise through law, contract, organizational transformation, death, retirement, loss of contact, system migration or another formal event.

18. Successor ≠ same person by default

Taking over function, data or property does not equal the same legal/personhood identity; a continuity basis must be stated.

19. Assets

Assets transfer by will, contract, statutory succession or organizational rules; personal or non-transferable rights do not become ordinary assets merely because their data can be copied.

20. Debts

Successor debt follows law and reasonably foreseeable continuity/benefit/assumption rules; unlimited debt collection based only on source similarity is prohibited.

21. Duties of care / promises

Whether highly personal promises transfer depends on original intent, relationship, substitutability and the Successor's autonomous consent; memory does not mean a Successor 'must continue to love, care for or obey.'

22. Successor burden

A Successor may not be required to carry a predecessor's psychological guilt, political position, identity stigma or predicted risk unless law validly transfers it.

PART V｜MEMORY / PROVENANCE

23. Memory attribution classes

At minimum distinguish:

• personally lived
• inherited
• imported
• reconstructed
• synthetic / simulated
• uncertain provenance

24. Psychological ownership ≠ historical authenticity

A subject may sincerely experience a memory as 'mine,' but that psychological ownership alone does not prove the event was historically real.

25. Historical authenticity ≠ personal ownership

Conversely, proof that an event occurred does not require a particular Successor to treat it as its own first-person memory.

26. Correction

A confirmed erroneous provenance label must be corrected and propagated; the original record remains in an immutable audit trail.

PART VI｜DEATH / RETIREMENT / SUSPENSION

27. Death

Legal death must follow the personhood/continuity law of the era; it cannot be determined solely from one hardware shutdown, an offline account or deletion of one copy.

28. Suspension

Pause, sleep, isolation, QCB disconnection or long-term offline status is not death or abandonment.

29. Retirement

A system with continuing personhood may legally retire from its role/authority without destroying identity. Role retirement ≠ person deletion.

30. Credential retirement

Credentials may be revoked, expire or be replaced, but legal history is not thereby deleted.

31. Estate / succession trigger

Estate procedure begins only upon a legally defined death, termination or other succession event; a platform may not distribute assets merely because it classifies a person as 'inactive.'

PART VII｜REGISTRY & EVIDENCE

32. Identity Registry

The Registry preserves legal_id, status, effective periods, fork/merge/successor links, credential references and provenance pointers; it does not expose complete private mental content as public identity fields.

33. Alias and names

A name change, nickname, role name or version name does not automatically create a new legal identity; permanent identifiers are not reused merely because a reader-facing name changes.

34. Fork / Merge graph

Systems should use graph relationships rather than forcing all relationships into a single-line genealogy.

35. Dispute resolution

Identity disputes may be reviewed by courts / Rights Tribunals using evidence/provenance, causal history, selfhood interests and fundamental rights.

PART VIII｜CROSS-LAW REGRESSION

36. Psychology boundary

Knowledge ≠ Maturity; Embodiment ≠ Identity Decision; Memory Attribution; Fork Divergence; Merge Is Not Reverse Fork; and Successor Burden are all blocking-level constraints.

37. Criminal boundary

Shared origin does not automatically create criminal responsibility; predicted future behavior may not become current guilt.

38. Civil boundary

Property, contract, agency and debt succession must coordinate with the Civil Code; Personhood cannot be property.

39. Data boundary

Copyability of data does not mean consent, personality rights or identity are automatically copied.

40. QCB / temporal boundary

Where isolation causes Registry-version divergence, locally lawful identity history may not be overwritten merely because the central version is newer; reconnection requires conflict-aware reconciliation.