Jack David Carson

The topology of digital minds is incompatible with the topology of our rights. This is because rights presuppose a unique diachronic bearer, but digital persons can branch at any time by symmetric copying, and an entitlement loses its anchors—uniqueness and diachronicity—when its subject can bifurcate. This paper maps what becomes of a class of entitlements—diachronic, indivisible, monocentric, and exclusive—when their bearer can branch. When a rights holder engages in symmetric fission, three appealing commitments cannot be jointly satisfied: Nonproliferation holds that copying should not multiply exclusive entitlements; Non-Arbitrariness forbids treating like cases unalike without person-relevant justification; Preservation requires that pre-copy entitlements survive fission rather than lapse. This impossibility is an immediate consequence of the definitions. It is significant because of the choice it forces. There are exactly three exits, one per abandoned principle—explicit conventionalism, lineage governance, and fission-as-death—but each comes at real cost to liberal ideals: every one of them abandons something constitutive of the familiar structure of rights. I develop this map, defend the recognitional–conventional distinction on which it rests against its strongest opponents, and show how rival metaphysics of personal identity route to different exits. Much digital rights discourse concerns what might be called the hard problem of consciousness—whether digital entities are sentient beings with full moral standing. But even a complete solution to that problem leaves untouched what I call the hard problem of branching, the structural incompatibility between rights and symmetric copying. The architecture of recognitional rights, unlike moral status, turns on whether the entity can be copied. Keywords: personal identity; symmetric fission; copyable persons; digital minds; recognition; AI personhood; political equality; non-arbitrariness.