Cobalt Dualism

Cobalt Dualism is a widespread philosophy of consciousness within the Cobalt Protectorate. The advent of technologies such as cybernetic augmentation, restructuring, human-like artificial antelligence, and animal augmentation has forced Cobalters everywhere to grapple with questions of identity that were heretofore considered the realm of thought experiments.
In short, Cobalt Dualism holds that, so long as the continuity of consciousness is not interrupted between two physical entites that embody it and, subsequently, that that consciousness does not somehow diverge in observable ways from the baseline, then that consciousness represents the same personage across any alterations that represent a transition between physical entities. Moreover, Cobalt Dualism holds that one metric for this determination is that the conscious person retains the memories, personality, cultural values, relationships, and loyalties that it did in its previous 'incarnation.'
In short, Cobalt Dualism holds that even radical changes to the corpus of a person don't change that person's identity - or rights and responsibilities as enumerated under the Code of Evermorn - so long as who they are on the 'inside' remains consistent. Two personalities that derive from a singular source, but then diverge over time (i.e. two separate HLAI 'uploads' derived from the same brain's neurophysical architecutre), are considered two different people, but may be considered the 'children' of the singular source from which they derived.
Under Cobalt Dualism, conscious beings may be considered monistic for the purposes of examining their behavior in the instant, but their unique personhood extends beyond the malleable state of their physical form. This interpretation of a unique 'personal spirit' is distinct from the Ancestral Patronist conception of a 'soul,' which is better understood as the ineffable 'person-ness' that an intelligent system exhibits and which persists after death in the sense that its influence on those acquainted with it extends beyond its own physical existence. Cobalt Dualism also breaks down somewhat in cases where a person's neuropsychology is radically altered; eventually, at a point that is difficult to define, a person's 'architecture' becomes so radically altered that the possibility of them retaining the same personality - and, thus, the same personage - becomes impossible. Aniki Labs' use of cybernetic subversion in the Armoa Conflict strikes at this point of uncertainty, a fact that makes Evermornans hate them even more ferociously.