Abstract
Deployed digital identity systems mostly decide what makes an individual the same individual on one of three grounds: something the entity is (a biometric body), something it holds (a key or certificate), or something it matches (attributes). Beneath identity sits a second question, on what ground a person is beyond price. This study reads the Theravāda Abhidhamma's analysis of the person for an answer to both. The tradition's taxonomy of mental events is one catalogue for every stream of mind; its book of formal controversies opens by denying that a person exists in the ultimate sense (Kathāvatthu I.1); what then distinguishes one stream from another is its history, a reading the texts permit and do not state, held as an engineering premise. From this the study derives a two-part formula: equality from the shared catalogue, because there is nothing of kind to rank, and dignity from the unrepeatable history, because a history has no second instance and so no price can name an equivalent for it. It reads four published designs against that ground: a per-entity identifier anchored by a birth coordinate rather than a biometric, an orthogonal proof of personhood, a rule under which a machine's identifier is revocable and a human's is not, and recovery of a lost key by the people who witnessed a life. Its limits: one-of-one goods are priced every day, the step from unrepeatable to beyond price is a commitment rather than a theorem, and the canon itself grades beings.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Ly, Thon, "One of One: Individuation Without Essence and the Ground of the Dignity Floor — Personal Identity as Event History in Decentralized Identifiers, Proof of Personhood and Social Key Recovery", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/12020