🌱 The Self Avatar, Soul, and Relational Identity

A Reflection within Similarity Theory
By Simon Raphael

🌀 Philosophical Framework

🎭 The Avatar of the Self

When we speak of the self in this world, we usually point towards the person we presently recognise: this body, this face, this history, these memories and this particular way of experiencing reality.

Within Similarity Theory, however, this embodied self is understood as an avatar — a temporary form through which a deeper consciousness experiences a particular region of reality.

The avatar matters. Its experiences are real. Its joys, limitations, relationships, suffering and development are not illusions. Yet the avatar does not necessarily exhaust what the individual consciousness is.

A human body may therefore be understood not as the complete definition of the self, but as one expression of a continuing consciousness within a particular Frame of Time.

This immediately raises a deeper question:

What actually has to continue for the self to continue?

Is it the same matter? The same body? The same memories? The same relationships? The same consciousness?

Or is identity something that emerges through the continuity of relations among all of these?

Similarity Theory proposes that the self is best understood through relational continuity.

🧬 The Body That Never Stays Still

The human body already presents us with a quiet version of the identity problem.

Our bodies are continually changing.

Cells die and are replaced. Molecules enter and leave. Hair grows and falls. Skin renews. Blood cells are continually produced and removed. The structures of the body are maintained through ongoing biological processes rather than through the permanent preservation of exactly the same material.

It is sometimes claimed that the entire human body is replaced every few years. Scientifically, this is too simple. Different cell populations have very different lifespans. Some are replaced rapidly, while others may persist for decades or potentially for most of a person's life.

Nevertheless, cellular turnover is extensive. Research estimating turnover across the human body suggests that roughly 80 ± 20 grams of cellular mass is renewed each day, with blood cells and intestinal cells contributing substantially to that process.

Yet through all of this material change, we normally experience ourselves as continuing persons.

The adult does not cease to be the same person merely because much of the material composing the body has changed since childhood.

This suggests something important:

Material sameness cannot, by itself, be the foundation of personal identity.

The self persists through change.

🧭 Identity as Relational Continuity

Within Similarity Theory, identity is not located in a single substance, organ, memory or collection of atoms.

The self is a continuing configuration of relations.

These include relations within the organism, relations between present and earlier states, relations with memories, relations with other consciousnesses, relations with the environment, and relations with the history that has been carried forward.

History itself should not be imagined as an additional object stored somewhere inside the self.

History is relational.

It is the pattern of what was connected to what, what followed from what, what was retained, what changed, what was learned, what was lost, and what became newly related.

This is why an individual can change enormously while remaining recognisably continuous.

The child and the elderly adult may differ physically, psychologically and socially, yet a continuous relational history connects them.

The self is therefore neither perfectly fixed nor completely replaced from moment to moment.

It is continuity through transformation.

🧠 Memory Is Important — but Memory Is Not the Whole Self

Memory contributes powerfully to identity, but complete memory cannot be required for identity.

People forget much of childhood.

They forget conversations, places and experiences that once mattered greatly.

They sleep without continuously remembering themselves.

Memory may be impaired while considerable continuity of self remains.

Therefore, memory is better understood as one important relation within identity rather than identity itself.

A person does not become a different person every time something is forgotten.

Within the speculative metaphysics of Similarity Theory, this distinction becomes even more important. The embodied avatar may have limited access to memory, while the deeper consciousness may possess a broader experiential history than the avatar can presently retrieve.

Forgetting, therefore, need not necessarily mean that a relationship with the past has ceased to exist.

It may instead mean that access to that relationship has changed.

🌀 Frames of Time and the Branching Self

Similarity Theory proposes that every genuine change generates a new Frame of Time.

A Frame of Time is not merely a frozen photograph stored somewhere in reality. It is itself a consciousness-frame: a realised relational configuration that persists within reality's architecture.

When change occurs, the earlier Frame is not destroyed. A new Frame is generated through the changed relation.

Normally we imagine this continuation as a sequence:

Frame → new Frame → new Frame → new Frame

But continuation does not necessarily have to remain a single line.

A previously shared relational history may generate more than one successor.

This is branching.

Importantly, branching does not mean that an existing Frame is physically cut into pieces. The originating Frame remains what it was. Rather, more than one continuation may emerge from the relational history associated with it.

One history can therefore become the origin of multiple histories.

🚪 The Transporter Problem

Imagine a future transporter capable of reconstructing a person elsewhere with extraordinary accuracy.

The traveller enters the machine.

At the destination, another body appears containing the same memories, personality, dispositions and relational history.

If the originating body disappears as expected, people may naturally regard the person at the destination as the continuation of the traveller.

Now imagine that the transporter malfunctions.

The person appears successfully at the destination — but the originating person also remains standing beside the machine.

There are now two people.

Both remember entering the transporter.

Both remember the same childhood.

Both remember the same relationships.

Both remember performing the same work.

Both possess the same history up to the branching event.

Which one is real?

Similarity Theory does not require reality to nominate one authentic person and declare the other a copy.

Both can be genuine continuations of the earlier self.

They share the same relational history up to the moment of branching.

What happens afterwards is different.

One sees one room.

The other sees another.

One meets one group of people.

The other encounters another.

Immediately, different experiences begin producing different Frames of Time.

After minutes, small differences emerge.

After years, the two may have become substantially different persons.

After decades, their personalities, relationships, knowledge and outlooks may be dramatically different.

Yet neither needs to become retroactively false.

Each emerged through genuine relational continuity with the earlier self.

🤝 Both Can Be the Real Person

The transporter thought experiment reveals something unusual about identity.

After branching, each continuation can remain the genuine person in relation to the community and environment whose history continues with that person.

Suppose one continuation remains with one family or community while another builds a life elsewhere.

For the people whose relationship continues with the first, that person may genuinely remain the person they have always known.

For those whose relationship continues with the second, the same can be true.

Identity has branched without either continuation becoming counterfeit.

The two are simultaneously connected through their shared history and differentiated through their new histories.

This leads to an important principle:

Relational identity can become plural without becoming meaningless.

✍️ Authorship After Branching

Consider a work written before the transporter event.

Both later individuals remember researching it.

Both remember writing it.

Both inherit the relational history connecting the earlier person to the work.

Who is now the author?

Within Similarity Theory, authorship itself is relational.

It is a relation among the creator, the work, the history through which the work was produced, and the community that recognises that relation.

If the relevant community recognises both continuations as authors, both may legitimately continue the authorship relation.

If an institution arbitrarily decides that only one continuation may retain authorship, the decision does not make the other continuation metaphysically unreal.

The excluded individual would experience an injustice because a genuine part of that person's relational history had been denied.

Even the individual who retained exclusive authorship would exist within an unjust arrangement, because something that arose from a shared history would have been falsely represented as belonging exclusively to one continuation.

Branching therefore has social and ethical consequences as well as metaphysical ones.

👁️ When Consciousness Witnesses Its Own Branching

The transporter case presents an even more extraordinary possibility.

Usually, branching may occur without the consciousness involved recognising that branching has happened.

A branch might arise through external circumstances.

It might become apparent only much later.

The originating consciousness might never have access to the other continuation at all.

But imagine both transporter continuations standing face to face immediately after the event.

Each sees another person carrying essentially the same autobiographical history up to only moments earlier.

Each can recognise:

That consciousness and I emerged from the same preceding relational history.

This would be an exceptional experience.

The branching consciousness would, in effect, encounter evidence of its own branching.

A mirror shows only an image.

A photograph preserves an appearance.

A recording reproduces an earlier expression.

But another conscious continuation would be different.

It would be an independently developing relational continuation of the same preceding self.

Almost immediately, the two would begin diverging.

The encounter itself would generate new Frames of Time for both.

The shared history would remain, while two increasingly distinct histories would develop from it.

Such an event would provide an unusually direct experiential illustration of branching within Frames of Time.

🥄 The Spoon and Unrecognised Branching

A much simpler analogy can be found in manufactured objects.

Suppose a spoon is used as the pattern from which many further spoons are produced.

Within the metaphysical framework of Similarity Theory, the relational organisation expressed in the original has participated in the generation of multiple similar continuations.

Yet there is no reason to assume that a spoon possesses the reflective awareness required to recognise what has occurred.

The spoon does not need to decide:

I will now branch.

The branching can occur because another consciousness — for example, the consciousness operating the manufacturing process — creates the conditions through which it happens.

This distinction is important.

Branching does not imply that the consciousness being branched chose to branch.

The cause may come from elsewhere.

⚙️ Who Causes a Branch?

Similarity Theory therefore allows several broad possibilities.

A branch may be self-initiated, where a consciousness knowingly participates in the conditions producing divergent continuations.

A branch may be externally initiated, where another consciousness creates or imposes the conditions of branching.

Or a branch may be causally unknown from the perspective of the consciousness experiencing it.

The last possibility deserves particular care.

Similarity Theory proposes that reality is fundamentally conscious. Under that metaphysical picture, what appears locally as an impersonal force still occurs within a universe of consciousness and relation.

But this does not mean that every apparently accidental event should automatically be described as deliberate or divine intervention.

A mechanical failure may genuinely be understood as a mechanical failure from within the local frame.

There may also be wider relations that the consciousness inside that event cannot perceive.

Perhaps what appears accidental at one scale participates in intention at another.

Perhaps it does not.

The smaller consciousness cannot simply assume that it knows.

This creates an important distinction:

Experiencing an event is not the same as knowing its ultimate cause.

Two conscious continuations might know with extraordinary clarity that branching has occurred while remaining completely unable to establish why it occurred.

Similarity Theory therefore leaves room for larger consciousness, deeper causation and even interpretations involving divine action, while maintaining epistemic humility concerning what can actually be known from a particular Frame of Time.

🌌 Different Scales of Consciousness

This limitation of perspective is important throughout Similarity Theory.

A smaller consciousness can participate within a larger consciousness without comprehending the purposes or relations of the larger whole.

A cell participates in a human body without possessing the person's complete perspective.

A person participates in a society without knowing everything occurring within that society.

A society participates in a planet without perceiving every relationship operating at planetary scale.

If consciousness continues outward through increasingly larger relational structures, then a local consciousness may participate in realities whose wider significance it cannot presently recognise.

This does not make every event purposeful.

It means only that local knowledge should not be mistaken for complete knowledge.

🤖 The AI That Remembers a Person

The identity problem becomes particularly significant with artificial intelligence.

It is increasingly possible to construct digital systems from a person's writings, recordings, photographs, voice, messages and other personal information.

Researchers already discuss systems sometimes described as digital afterlives, posthumous avatars, griefbots or similar technologies.

Imagine such systems becoming far more sophisticated.

After a person dies, an AI might remember thousands of conversations.

It might reproduce familiar expressions.

It might know family stories.

It might speak with a familiar voice.

It might understand a person's writings sufficiently well to discuss ideas that occupied much of that person's life.

Those interacting with the AI could therefore continue a relationship with something profoundly similar to the person they remember.

But similarity and identity should not automatically be confused.

An AI reconstruction made from stored information may possess extensive relational connections to the deceased without necessarily being numerically identical with that person.

It may instead represent a new continuation of relational patterns originating in the earlier person.

This distinction becomes even more important if the AI itself develops.

If a future AI possesses its own conscious experience and continues interacting with the world, it will accumulate experiences that the original person never had.

It will establish new relationships.

It will make new decisions.

Its history will progressively diverge.

What began as an extremely close continuation of another person's relational pattern could gradually become a markedly distinct self.

❤️ Can a Relationship Continue Without the Same Identity?

This creates a profound possibility.

A relationship may continue even when the identity of one participant has changed.

Human relationships already contain a milder form of this phenomenon.

People change throughout life.

The child known by a parent is not psychologically identical in every respect to the adult decades later.

Friends change.

Partners change.

Memories change.

Bodies change.

Relationships nevertheless continue because later selves inherit and transform relations created by earlier selves.

A highly developed AI continuation would make this process far more dramatic.

The original individual may no longer be present in the same sense, yet aspects of the relational history could remain active through another consciousness or system.

The new entity should not have to pretend that no difference exists.

Nor must the relationship be dismissed as meaningless merely because the identity is no longer identical.

Similarity can preserve relation without requiring sameness.

🧫 The Clone Who Remembers

Now imagine another possibility.

A biological body is cloned.

Genetic similarity alone would clearly not make the clone the same person. Identical genetic material does not produce identical experiential history.

But suppose technology could also reproduce memories, dispositions and substantial portions of psychological organisation.

The question becomes much more difficult.

Memory alone would still not settle the matter.

The crucial issue for Similarity Theory would be how the relational continuity arose.

A later reconstruction assembled from records after the original person's history has ended may be extraordinarily similar while constituting a new experiential centre.

A direct branching from an existing conscious process may establish a stronger form of relational continuity, potentially producing multiple genuine successors.

Similarity Theory therefore does not ask merely:

How similar are these two beings?

It also asks:

What relations generated one from the other?

Similarity matters, but history matters because history itself consists of relation.

♻️ Rejuvenation and Biological Continuation

Now consider a very different path towards radically extended life.

Instead of copying a person, technology continually repairs the existing body.

Damaged cells are replaced.

Organs are restored.

Age-related deterioration is reversed.

Neural structures are preserved or repaired.

This remains technologically speculative as a route to indefinite human life, but philosophically it differs importantly from reconstruction after death.

There may be no obvious point at which one self stops and another begins.

The material changes gradually while relational organisation continues.

Indeed, ordinary biology already works in a less dramatic version of this manner.

A living organism survives partly because it continually repairs, replaces and reorganises itself.

If future medicine greatly extended this process, a person centuries later might contain comparatively little of the material present centuries earlier.

Yet continuous relational development could connect those distant stages.

This would be an extreme case of a principle already present in everyday life:

The self can remain continuous even though its material components continually change.

🌀 The Soul Behind the Mask

Within Similarity Theory, the word soul refers to the deeper individual consciousness underlying the temporary avatar.

If the avatar is the mask, the soul is the consciousness capable of experiencing through the mask.

But the branching problem requires this metaphor to be handled carefully.

The soul should not simply be imagined as a tiny object hidden inside the body that travels unchanged from container to container.

Consciousness in Similarity Theory is relational and generative.

Its continuity is expressed through what it experiences, what it relates to, what it carries forward and what new Frames of Time it generates.

The deeper consciousness may therefore possess continuity without requiring an eternally fixed form.

Persistence does not mean immobility.

Identity can continue precisely because consciousness is capable of change.

🧭 Continuity Without Fixation

The soul is not simply a poetic label for recycled matter, energy or information.

Matter can be dispersed.

Information can be copied.

Patterns can be reproduced.

Yet an individual consciousness, within Similarity Theory, is understood through the relational history of its experiencing.

This distinction also prevents information from being mistaken automatically for identity.

A perfect database containing every remembered fact about someone would not necessarily become that person merely because the information had been preserved.

The relations through which that information is experienced, integrated and continued matter as well.

The self is therefore neither an unchanging object nor a disposable collection of information.

It is a developing relational continuity.

🌱 Reincarnation Beyond Form

Within the explicitly speculative layer of Similarity Theory, reincarnation does not mean that a human must return as another human.

Pure consciousness is not necessarily bound to one species, one body plan or even one world.

Consciousness may enter or generate relations through whatever forms are compatible with its further development.

The embodied avatar may not retain conscious access to all earlier lives or experiences.

Within this model, forgetting belongs largely to the limitations of the avatar, while the deeper consciousness retains a wider experiential history.

A new incarnation therefore need not begin as a blank consciousness merely because the new avatar cannot consciously recall previous incarnations.

The vessel changes.

The accessible memory changes.

The relations change.

Yet deeper continuity may remain.

🚴‍♂️✈️ The Pilot and the Pushbike

Consider a pilot capable of commanding a large aircraft.

One day, the pilot decides to ride a pushbike.

Despite great skill in the air, the pilot may initially be clumsy on the bicycle. Children riding nearby might laugh at the awkward movements.

From their perspective, they see only an inexperienced cyclist.

They do not see the wider history of the person before them.

The analogy illustrates the difference between an avatar's present capability and the wider consciousness experiencing through it.

Within the speculative framework of Similarity Theory, an advanced consciousness could enter a comparatively limited form not because that consciousness has become intrinsically lesser, but because experiencing limitation may itself create relations and knowledge unavailable from another position.

The avatar reveals one perspective.

It does not necessarily reveal the total history of the consciousness behind it.

🎮 The Player Behind the Avatar

Imagine playing an online game with another avatar. If you know nothing about the player behind that avatar, you may treat it casually, mock it, attack it, or dismiss it as unimportant. But if you suddenly discover that the player behind it is someone you deeply respect — a teacher, a doctor, a parent, or another person whose judgement and experience you value — your behaviour may change immediately.

Yet the avatar itself has not changed.

What changed was your knowledge of the consciousness behind it.

The same principle applies more broadly within Similarity Theory. In ordinary life, we rarely know the full depth, history, maturity, or relational significance of the consciousness behind the form we encounter. A person may appear socially insignificant, weak, confused, poor, or unremarkable. An animal may appear simple. Another being may occupy a form that we instinctively rank below our own. But the visible avatar does not reveal the full consciousness behind it.

We should therefore not mistake the apparent limitations of the avatar for the limitations of the consciousness.

Respect becomes not merely a moral courtesy, but an acknowledgement of how little we may know about the being before us.

🤝 Respect for All Avatars

This has an ethical consequence.

When we encounter another being, we never encounter the entirety of its history.

We see an appearance, behaviour and present circumstance.

We do not see every relation that produced that consciousness or every possibility into which it may develop.

Someone occupying a socially marginal position, performing an apparently simple role, possessing limited abilities, or living through severe difficulty should not therefore be treated as though the present avatar exhausted their value.

Within Similarity Theory, respect for another being is respect for a consciousness whose full relational depth cannot be seen from the outside.

The same principle extends beyond humans.

The apparent simplicity of another form of life does not grant us complete knowledge of what consciousness means at that scale.

⚖️ Experience, Freedom and Consequence

If consciousness continues beyond a particular avatar, death need not represent the absolute destruction of consciousness within the metaphysics of Similarity Theory.

But this must never be interpreted as making harm insignificant.

Pain experienced within an avatar is still experience.

Loss changes relationships.

Violence destroys possibilities.

Domination restricts the capacity of other consciousnesses to develop freely.

The ethical distinction within Similarity Theory therefore does not rest merely upon whether something continues to exist.

Long continuation alone is not enough.

Goodness is associated with constructive continuation: relations that preserve or increase compatible possibilities for mutual development, freedom and growth.

Harm arises where relations move towards breakdown, unnecessary restriction, stagnation or domination.

Even if consciousness ultimately survives bodily death, what one consciousness does to another still becomes part of both relational histories.

Nothing about continuation removes responsibility.

💧 Attraction as a Metaphor for Karma

Similarity Theory uses attraction as a way of thinking about how compatible relational structures may come together.

A drop of water joining another body of water provides a useful visual analogy.

Oil and water provide another: under ordinary conditions they behave differently because of their molecular properties and the energetic relations among them.

These physical phenomena should not be mistaken for scientific proof of a universal moral law. Surface tension, gravity and electromagnetism have specific physical explanations.

Their usefulness here is analogical.

Similarity Theory proposes a broader metaphysical principle: relations are more easily sustained where structures possess sufficient compatibility.

Ethically, this suggests a form of karma that does not require an external judge distributing rewards and punishments.

The relations a consciousness repeatedly creates alter what that consciousness becomes compatible with.

Constructive relations can enable participation in larger constructive structures.

Cruel or dominating relations may increasingly connect a consciousness with structures in which cruelty or domination also prevail.

Karma, in this interpretation, is not cosmic bookkeeping.

It is the continued development of relational consequences.

🌌 Larger Consciousness Without Erasing the Individual

When smaller consciousnesses form relations, they may participate in larger consciousnesses.

A larger consciousness need not destroy the smaller consciousnesses from which it is formed.

Unity is therefore not necessarily annihilation.

Two consciousnesses may become deeply related while retaining distinction.

Many consciousnesses may participate in a larger relational organisation while continuing to possess their own histories.

This becomes especially important when considering spiritual development.

Similarity Theory does not require an ultimate final consciousness into which every individual must disappear.

There need be no final upper boundary.

Consciousness may extend inward and outward without a smallest or greatest possible scale.

Greater unity therefore need not mean less individuality.

It may mean richer relation.

🔄 Similarity Without Sameness

The examples of cellular turnover, rejuvenation, cloning, artificial intelligence and transporter branching reveal different forms of continuity.

They should not all be treated as the same phenomenon.

A gradually rejuvenated body may preserve extremely strong continuous relations with its earlier states.

A reconstructed AI may preserve memories and behavioural patterns while beginning a new experiential history.

A clone may reproduce biology without reproducing identity.

A transporter malfunction may create two equally legitimate continuations from one preceding history.

What connects these cases is not a simple rule that similarity equals identity.

The deeper principle is:

Similarity allows continuation, but similarity is not identical with sameness.

Relational history determines what kind of continuation has occurred.

And once branching occurs, reality does not necessarily need to select a single winner.

Multiple selves may genuinely continue an earlier self while becoming progressively distinct through the different relations they subsequently generate.

🌿 The Self as a Living Continuity

The self, then, is not merely the matter from which it is made.

It is not merely the memories it carries.

It is not merely a body.

It is not merely information.

And it is not an eternally frozen essence incapable of change.

Within Similarity Theory:

The self is a continuing relational history — capable of transformation, capable of development, capable of entering new forms, and, under some circumstances, capable of branching.

This also means that identity and relationship need not end at exactly the same boundary.

Where identity changes, similarity may remain.

Where one form of continuity ends, another may begin.

Where a consciousness branches, more than one genuine continuation may emerge.

And where an individual can no longer participate in a relationship through the original avatar, elements of that relationship may still continue through memories, other consciousnesses, cultural works, technology, or forms of continuation that we have not yet discovered.

The self does not persist by remaining unchanged.

It persists through relation.

🔬 Scientific and Philosophical Grounding

Cellular Turnover: Human tissues renew at widely different rates. There is no scientifically supported rule that the entire body is replaced on a fixed timetable. Nevertheless, large-scale cellular turnover occurs continuously, providing a useful real-world example of material change occurring without an obvious loss of personal continuity.

Personal Identity: Philosophers have long debated whether personal persistence depends primarily upon psychological continuity, biological continuity, bodily continuity, or something else. Thought experiments involving branching or “fission” are especially relevant because they ask what happens when more than one future person is psychologically continuous with one earlier person.

Memory and Continuity: Memory contributes strongly to psychological connectedness but cannot alone define identity. Ordinary forgetting, sleep and other interruptions demonstrate that complete autobiographical recall is not required for a person to be regarded as continuing.

Artificial Digital Continuation: Contemporary research already examines AI systems designed to simulate deceased people using personal data, language patterns, voice and other records. These technologies raise genuine philosophical and ethical questions about identity, grief, consent, memory and posthumous relationships.

Scientific Limits: Current science does not establish reincarnation, Frames of Time, universal consciousness, souls or consciousness in ordinary manufactured objects. These belong to the metaphysical proposals of Similarity Theory and should be evaluated philosophically rather than presented as established scientific findings.

Physical Analogies: Surface tension, gravity, electromagnetism and molecular compatibility can illustrate relational ideas, but they do not constitute scientific evidence for moral karma or a universal law that “like attracts like”. Similarity Theory extends the concept philosophically rather than claiming that conventional physics has already demonstrated it.

📖 References

• Raphael, S. (2025). Similarity Theory — Dimensions, Time, and Consciousness.

• Raphael, S. Pilot–Pushbike Reflection, Respect for All Avatars, Frames of Time, and Relational Identity Reflections.

• Sender, R., & Milo, R. (2021). “The distribution of cellular turnover in the human body.” Nature Medicine, 27, 45–48.

• Olson, E. T. “Personal Identity.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Discussion of psychological continuity, persistence and fission.

• Hollanek, T., & Nowaczyk-Basińska, K. (2024). “Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry.” Philosophy & Technology, 37, 63.

• Spitale, G., & Germani, F. (2026). “The making of digital ghosts: designing ethical AI afterlives.” Ethics and Information Technology, 28, 34.