# Activation Triage **Domain:** Digital Afterlife / Continuity Governance / Resource Allocation / Due Process **Doc Type:** Canonical Governance Concept Node **Maturity:** Proposed / Red-Team Critical **Evidence / Concept Status:** Prospective corpus proposal; no present system can reconstruct and activate human consciousness as described here ## Definition **Activation triage** is the prospective separation of preservation from execution when continuity-bearing records or reconstructions exceed the resources, permissions or legal basis available for active instantiation. [[articles/Escape Hatch in the Skull|Escape Hatch in the Skull]] proposes a universal catalog with selective activation: preserve broadly because a later decision may correct an earlier error; activate only under explicit authorization, adequate resources and a governance process capable of review. The defensible core is the distinction **archive is not reconstruction, and reconstruction is not activation**. ## Status Boundary This is not a description of present capability or law. No demonstrated system can preserve, reconstruct and activate human consciousness in the article's sense. Current digital estates, replicas, models and archives must not be described as dormant persons without additional evidence. The node therefore treats the article's moral-qualification and phenomenological-range proposals as claims to be contested, not as settled admission criteria. Any future system ranking persons by virtue, worth, intelligence, social status, religious identity or inferred interior quality would create an extreme civil-rights and capture risk. ## Required Separations Activation governance must keep separate: **preservation → reconstruction → executable readiness → activation → resource tier → legal recognition** Authorization at one stage does not imply authorization at the next. [[wiki/Continuity Election|Continuity election]] records the source person's instructions; [[wiki/Continuity Supersession|continuity supersession]] protects the later autonomous continuant's right to revise them. Resource scarcity is real, but scarcity does not prove that a proposed score is legitimate. [[wiki/Thermodynamic Constraints|thermodynamic constraints]] and [[wiki/Continuity Resource Allocation|continuity resource allocation]] identify the engineering problem. They do not determine whose experience matters. ## Constitutional Minimum Any activation-triage regime would require, at minimum: - explicit stage-specific consent or a lawful, reviewable default; - published criteria and provenance for every material input; - [[wiki/Model Contestability|model contestability]] and independent replication; - [[wiki/Score Separability|score separability]] so one disputed judgment cannot silently control every outcome; - anti-discrimination rules and a ban on credential, wealth, caste or belief as hidden proxies for worth; - reasons, notice, appeal, re-evaluation and representation for affected claimants; - distributed custody and protection from self-dealing by designers or first beneficiaries; - reversible activation decisions wherever technically possible; - a service floor protecting already-active subjects from punitive throttling or deletion. ## Hot and Cold States [[wiki/Hot Interpreter and Cold Archive|Hot interpreter and cold archive]] provides a useful operational distinction. A cold archive preserves material for possible future interpretation; a hot interpreter actively executes and changes state. Moving from cold to hot may create a new rights event, new dependencies and potentially a claimant whose interests are no longer identical to the source person's instructions. ## Religious and Contractual Boundary [[wiki/Eschatological Neutrality|Eschatological neutrality]] prohibits administrators from converting doctrine, baptism, membership or disbelief into automatic civil authorization. An [[wiki/Eternal Disposition Contract|eternal disposition contract]] can make a preference legible, but it cannot bind an autonomous later person forever or substitute for a provider's actual service obligations. ## Key Insight **Preserving an option can be an act of humility; deciding who may become active is an exercise of constitutional power. Scarcity explains why allocation exists, not why any particular allocator, metric or hierarchy is just.** ## See Also [[wiki/Digital Afterlife|Digital Afterlife]] · [[wiki/Digital Afterlife Governance|Digital Afterlife Governance]] · [[wiki/Continuity Disposition|Continuity Disposition]] · [[wiki/Continuity Default Rule|Continuity Default Rule]] · [[wiki/Rights|Rights]] · [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]]