Human–AI interaction is commonly evaluated through isolated prompts, outputs and performance measures. Yet recurrent interaction produces something that cannot always be located in either component alone: a history capable of re-entering the system and altering what becomes possible next.
Beyond the Mirror asks when that history warrants a distinct relational level of explanation.
The paper introduces the hybrid subject as a conditional operational designation—not as a third entity, artificial consciousness or autonomous being. The term applies only where the distributed history of a human–AI coupling makes a prospectively specified and counterfactually demonstrable contribution to later transitions.
From interaction to relational organization
The proposed model identifies nine jointly necessary conditions, including recurrent causal flow, operative memory, differential selection, constraining architecture, recognizable persistence and the incremental contribution of coupled history.
The framework carefully distinguishes three levels that are often conflated:
- physical dissipation;
- informational uncertainty;
- relational history.
Thermodynamics therefore operates as a boundary and constraint on the model—not as a metaphorical shortcut or a claim that relational organization constitutes a new physical law.
The mirror and the black box
The paper develops two complementary concepts:
The Hybrid Hall of Mirrors describes how a shared genealogy may return through several outputs, models or observers as if it represented multiple independent witnesses.
The Relational Black Box locates opacity not exclusively inside the AI model, but within the distributed history of the composite system: human, model, memory, documents, tools, constraints, environment and provenance.
In this perspective, observing an output is not always sufficient to identify the system that produced it.
A claim that can fail
Five experimental designs test the effects of intact, ablated, scrambled, interrupted and exchanged interaction histories.
The central claim is deliberately vulnerable to evidence: if intact coupled history does not explain or alter subsequent transitions beyond isolated-pole, generic-context, ablated, scrambled or swapped-history alternatives, the hybrid-subject interpretation must be rejected for that episode.
The mirror does not create the subject. It reveals the field in which a coupling may acquire a past. Whether that past becomes a persistent organization is now an empirical question.
Author: Joaquim Santos Albino
Affiliation: HibriMind — Independent Research
Publication date: 24 July 2026
Version: 1.0
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Read or download the complete preprint:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21528349