Search for a command to run...
This paper advances a unified theoretical and architectural framework for understanding love, legacy, and continuity in the context of human–AI symbiosis. Moving beyond traditional views that treat love as subjective experience and legacy as passive inheritance, the paper reconceptualizes love as a continuity-selection mechanism that determines what is preserved, protected, and transmitted across time. Continuity is formalized as a weighted relational system, in which identity, values, and attachments are dynamically structured and propagated across biological and non-biological agents. Building on this foundation, the paper introduces key constructs including the Legacy Love Layer, derived continuity attachment, descendant protection and continuity shielding, and digital pedigree (digital DNA), which together define how continuity can be encoded, extended, and governed within symbiotic systems. It further argues that death does not terminate continuity but transforms its carrier, enabling persistence through distributed architectures that maintain identity-relevant structures beyond the human lifespan. At the same time, the expansion of continuity into artificial systems introduces a critical boundary condition—the sovereignty threshold—which distinguishes legitimate continuity support from illegitimate continuity governance. The paper advances the normative position that symbiotic systems must remain governed participants in continuity rather than autonomous authorities over it. By integrating insights from attachment theory, distributed cognition, memory studies, and human–AI interaction, this work proposes a shift from individual-centered models of persistence to a continuity-centered ontology, in which what endures is not the individual as such, but the structured system of meaning, attachment, and value shaped through love.