Reconstructing Human Rights for Post-Biological Humanity Continuity-Based Personhood as a Jurisprudential Response to Whole-Brain Emulation

Abstract

International human rights law has never had to justify itself to a subject who is no longer biological.  This article uses whole-brain emulation, the hypothetical complete transfer of consciousness, memory, and personality to a non-biological substrate, with no death occurring and legal identity unbroken, as a jurisprudential stress test of that law's implicit anthropology. Close doctrinal reading shows that biological embodiment, mortality, singular psychological boundedness, and territorial situated-ness are load-bearing for specific rights to markedly different degrees. Drawing on legal-personhood theory, the philosophy of personal identity, dignity theory, and neuro-rights scholarship, the article constructs a three-limb legal test for continuity of personhood across substrate transfer, a hybrid agency-and-practice account of human dignity capable of grounding rights without embodiment, a reconception of five core human rights provisions, and a layered institutional architecture for their enforcement. The resulting construct, continuity-based personhood, is tested against its strongest objections rather than insulated from them, and the article's conclusion is a qualified affirmative: international human rights law can remain coherent once its embodiment premise is removed, provided the tradition relocates the ground of protection from biological embodiment, shown here to be a historically universal but not conceptually necessary proxy, to demonstrable continuity of the person.

Keywords: Whole-Brain Emulation, Continuity-Based Personhood, International Human Rights Law, Substrate Transfer, Legal Personhood Theory, Personal Identity, Dignity, Neurorights, Institutional Governance.