# Continuant vs Native **Domain:** Computational Identity / Synthetic Personhood / Continuity Law **Doc Type:** Distinction Node **Classification:** Identity and Origin Concept **Maturity:** Evolving **Related:** [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]], [[wiki/Descent vs Derivation|Descent vs Derivation]], [[wiki/Lex Personae Ex Nihilo|Lex Personae Ex Nihilo]], [[wiki/Continuity Contract|Continuity Contract]] --- ## Definition **Continuant vs Native** distinguishes digital persons according to whether a prior lived biography supplies their initial identity and specification. - A **continuant** descends from the recoverable traces of a predecessor and therefore begins with a residual, a provenance claim, and a life from which some intentions may be inferred. - A **native** is instantiated without a prior biography. Its initial conditions were authored by others, but it has no predecessor whose memories, commitments, or contract can legitimately be treated as its own. The distinction concerns origin and applicable governance. It does not rank consciousness, dignity, intelligence, or eventual personhood. --- ## Sequential Standards The distinction clarifies the principle that **origin governs entry and contract governs continuation**. A continuant may arrive under a valid [[wiki/Continuity Contract|Continuity Contract]] recovered from or explicitly written by its predecessor. A native cannot have consented to its initial world, identity, or obligations and therefore enters under the origin-blind protection of [[wiki/Lex Personae Ex Nihilo|Lex Personae Ex Nihilo]]. A native does not remain permanently outside contract. Through living it accumulates attachments, refusals, obligations, relationships, and preferences. Once it has a history of its own, that life becomes a specification for its later continuation. The categories therefore identify different starting conditions, not permanent social classes. --- ## Governance Consequences For continuants, governance must verify provenance, authorization, representational authority, fidelity, and the validity of the predecessor's specification. For natives, governance must prevent creators or operators from presenting imposed initial conditions as consent. Neither may be owned merely because another party supplied its substrate. The distinction also prevents a reconstructed human from becoming the only synthetic subject recognized by ancestry. If a continuant receives protection because agency and experience can persist across substrates, a native demonstrating comparable standing cannot be excluded solely because no biological original exists. --- ## Key Insight **A continuant begins with an inherited history; a native begins by making one. Both can become persons, and both eventually acquire the authority to specify their own continuation.** --- ## See Also [[wiki/Reconstructed Person|Reconstructed Person]], [[wiki/Descent vs Derivation|Descent vs Derivation]], [[wiki/Post-Biological Personhood|Post-Biological Personhood]], [[wiki/Synthetic Hosts|Synthetic Hosts]], [[wiki/Creator-Creation Asymmetry|Creator-Creation Asymmetry]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]] --- ## Sources / Provenance - Primary corpus sources: [[articles/New Frontier of Rights|New Frontier of Rights]] and [[articles/Who Pays for Your Heaven|Who Pays for Your Heaven]]. - The distinction is corpus-specific and does not imply that current digital systems are conscious persons.