Digital Mediation, Selfhood, and Hybrid Agency: A Minimal Three-Dimensional Framework

Abstract

Abstract Claims that digital technologies blur the boundaries of consciousness and personal identity often collapse several distinct philosophical questions. This article develops a minimal three-dimensional framework of digital mediation that distinguishes cognitive integration, self-representational mediation, and agential distribution. Unlike existing multidimensional accounts that remain within one domain, the framework coordinates evidence across cognition, selfhood, and action while specifying which cross-domain inferences require an additional bridge argument. Digital artifacts may scaffold or partly constitute cognitive processes without extending phenomenal consciousness; profiles, avatars, and technologically organized memories may participate in narrative and practical selfhood without multiplying numerically distinct persons; and artificial systems may redistribute control within hybrid action without acquiring moral responsibility or personhood. Each dimension is assessed through explicit ordinal criteria rather than an impressionistic low–high scale. The framework is applied to conversational artificial intelligence, personal-memory systems, immersive avatars, recommender systems, and brain–computer interfaces. It also derives dimension-specific vulnerabilities and safeguards: continuity and provenance for cognitive dependence, contestability and contextual integrity for mediated selfhood, and meaningful control and responsibility mapping for distributed action. The result is a relational account of digital transformation that identifies how technologies reorganize thinking, self-interpretation, and control without positing a unitary “digital consciousness.”