Ontology of Avatars

Generative artificial intelligence increasingly blurs the boundary between cognitive assistance, cognitive delegation, and cognitive replication. This paper begins with the problem of AI-assisted authorship and proposes the concept of negotiated cognition to describe recursive human–AI interaction in which intellectual products emerge through iterative cycles of generation, evaluation, rejection, and reformulation. It then follows the same trajectory toward increasingly personalized systems capable not merely of assisting a user but of modelling and potentially reproducing that user’s characteristic patterns of interpretation and decision. To analyse this transition, the paper distinguishes informational, behavioural, cognitive, identitarian, phenomenal, and personal continuity. It introduces resolution-limited identitarian continuity to emphasize that identity cannot be reconstructed solely from first-person self-report, but depends upon behavioural, interpersonal, historical, and contextual perspectives that may never be exhaustively captured. The analysis then examines bifurcation, cognitive twins, posthumous avatars, mind uploading, inherited autobiography, memory governance, responsibility, legal personality, and the possibility of conscious successors. The central argument is that even maximally faithful reconstruction does not, by itself, establish numerical personal continuity. The paper therefore advances a Successor Thesis: artificial reconstruction should be presumed to generate a successor whose particular forms of continuity with the source must be specified, rather than the surviving original, unless an additional account of personal continuity is provided.