An Onto-Relational-Sophic Framework for Governing Synthetic Minds
This addresses the problem of outdated regulatory paradigms for increasingly capable AI, offering a philosophical foundation for governance, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing philosophical ideas.
The paper tackles the lack of conceptual and governance frameworks for advanced AI systems by introducing the Onto-Relational-Sophic framework, which provides integrated answers through ontology, digital personhood, and axiology, and demonstrates its application to scenarios like autonomous research agents and AI-mediated healthcare.
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, from task-specific systems to foundation models exhibiting broad, flexible competence across reasoning, creative synthesis, and social interaction, has outpaced the conceptual and governance frameworks designed to manage it. Current regulatory paradigms, anchored in a tool-centric worldview, address algorithmic bias and transparency but leave unanswered foundational questions about what increasingly capable synthetic minds are, how societies should relate to them, and the normative principles that should guide their development. Here we introduce the Onto-Relational-Sophic (ORS) framework, grounded in Cyberism philosophy, which offers integrated answers to these challenges through three pillars: (1) a Cyber-Physical-Social-Thinking (CPST) ontology that defines the mode of being for synthetic minds as irreducibly multi-dimensional rather than purely computational; (2) a graded spectrum of digital personhood providing a pragmatic relational taxonomy beyond binary person-or-tool classifications; and (3) Cybersophy, a wisdom-oriented axiology synthesizing virtue ethics, consequentialism, and relational approaches to guide governance. We apply the framework to emergent scenarios including autonomous research agents, AI-mediated healthcare, and agentic AI ecosystems, demonstrating its capacity to generate proportionate, adaptive governance recommendations. The ORS framework charts a path from narrow technical alignment toward comprehensive philosophical foundations for the synthetic minds already among us.