THE SOVEREIGN SELF: OWNERSHIP RIGHTS AND DIGITAL PERSONHOOD IN THE AGE OF THE DIGITAL TWIN

This paper explores the far-reaching legal, philosophical and geopolitical challenges that have arisen with the emergence of Human Digital Twin (DT) technology. This study challenges the historically dominant yet conceptually problematic metaphors of data extraction, and introduces the Digital Twin as a symbiotic extension of human identity, as a "Digital Personhood" that is a manifest instance of a person. We construct a dangerous legal asymmetry between the authors of computational architectures and the inventors of human behavioral essence through a synthesis of technical architectures, the IP "stack" and geopolitical theories of strategic autonomy. We examine the evolution of digital twins from the simple to the autonomous, prescriptive and how this is an assault on individual cognitive liberty and free will, as digital twins continue to evolve and become more powerful, with ever-increasing levels of real-time, automated feedback and simulation of human behaviour. This paper is a powerful proposal for "Data Dominion" which treats the unauthorized creation or manipulation of a human replica as identity theft, not just property infringement, and makes it lawful. Lastly, we suggest some practical remedies that can be implemented in today's jurisprudence, and use a Notice of Motion as a tool to enforce statutory “kill switches” under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the sanctity of the In 1991, computer scientist David Gelernter described a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction that would soon come to pass in his influential book Mirror Worlds: The Parallel Universes of Computer Simulation and Reality. The rise of software systems that would encapsulate, synchronize and operate large-scale, real-time simulations of the physical world. Gelernter predicted that these “mirror worlds” would one day break out of their institutional confines and become “multi-layered and dynamic” dimensions of the digital world that would coexist with humans. The term "Digital Twin" was introduced in 2010 in the aerospace industry in the context of optimizing the physical-model simulation of complex spacecraft systems, by NASA engineer John Vickers. The classical digital twin architecture was established by Dr. Michael Grieves and is based on a triad: a physical object in real space, a virtual representation in digital space and a continuous communication channel—the "digital thread"—providing a two-way flow of information.