Cross-Substrate Agency Attribution

# Cross-Substrate Agency Attribution **Entity class:** Organization or institution **Domain:** Rights / Law / Identity / Embodiment **Doc Type:** Canonical Governance Concept **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[wiki/Authority–Identity Separation|Authority–Identity Separation]], [[wiki/Addressable Embodiment|Addressable Embodiment]], [[wiki/Transition Consent|Transition Consent]] --- ## Definition **Cross-Substrate Agency Attribution** is the evidentiary and legal process of distinguishing the intentional actor, local embodiment, displaced native, delegated authority and technical operator when action crosses an embodiment or substrate boundary. ## Minimum Evidence - authenticated occupant and session provenance; - a time-resolved control-state record; - separation of native, operator and automated actions; - records of authorization, revocation and access escalation; - memory provenance and preservation of exculpatory state; and - an appeal route capable of reaching the infrastructure custodian. ## Context In [[wiki/The Thirteenth Floor (1999)|The Thirteenth Floor]], David acts through Hall's body. Witnesses encounter Hall's embodiment while the relevant intent belongs elsewhere. Treating the body as the person would punish a local subject for an upper operator's acts. The concept generalizes to remote avatars, shared control, neural interfaces and autonomous co-agents without assuming that any current system reproduces the film's mechanics. ## Key Insight **When embodiment no longer proves occupancy, accountability requires provenance of control rather than appearance alone.** ## Simple Reminders, Quotations, and Thoughts > "We can back-up petabytes of sili-brains perfectly in seconds, but transfer of information between carbo-brains takes decades and the similarity between the copies is barely recognizable. Some speculate that we could translate from carbo to sili, and even get the sili version to behave like the original. However, such a task requires much deeper understanding than merely making a copy." > **— George Church**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Mind Upload/Copying a Brain Requires More Than Copying Its Information by George Church|Copying a Brain Requires More Than Copying Its Information by George Church]] > "From this point of view therefore, as long as I understand the material explanation of a machine's behavior, I will argue that it doesn't think." > **— Emanuel Derman**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Identity/Explaining a Machine’s Behavior Does Not Prove It Thinks by Emanuel Derman|Explaining a Machine’s Behavior Does Not Prove It Thinks by Emanuel Derman]] > "A human download can think as fast as an AI, and compete with AI's if the human download wants too." > **— Frank Tipler**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Mind Upload/Human Downloads Could Compete With AI by Frank Tipler|Human Downloads Could Compete With AI by Frank Tipler]] > "What do I think about machines that think? Well, of course it depends on who that person is." > **— Robert Sapolsky**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Machine Succession/It Depends on Who the Thinking Machine Is by Robert Sapolsky|It Depends on Who the Thinking Machine Is by Robert Sapolsky]] > "Machines (humanly constructed artifacts) cannot think because no machine has a point of view; that is, a unique perspective on the worldly referents of its internal symbolic logic." > **— Arnold Trehub**, *2015, Edge annual question “What Do You Think About Machines That Think?”* [[reminders/Identity/Machines Cannot Think Without a Point of View by Arnold Trehub|Machines Cannot Think Without a Point of View by Arnold Trehub]] ## Sources / Provenance - Canonicalized from the David/Hall occupancy case in [[wiki/The Thirteenth Floor (1999)|The Thirteenth Floor]]. - Legal applications are prospective corpus analysis. ## See Also [[wiki/Native Displacement|Native Displacement]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]], [[wiki/Proof of Descent|Proof of Descent]], [[wiki/Ownership of Mind|Ownership of Mind]] ## Relationships  This entry's documented connections are expressed in its definition and related-work routes, with provenance retained in the source-linked material.