The Intellectual Entities Framework (IEF) is a substrate‑neutral conceptual architecture for classifying, comparing, and analyzing cognitive agents across biological, artificial, and hybrid domains. It provides a unified vocabulary and structural ontology for describing how different kinds of minds—human, nonbiological, collective, distributed, or mixed—interact, coordinate, and co‑construct meaning. The framework introduces a tiered classification system (IE, IEB, IEN, IE‑N#) that distinguishes between category‑level cognitive entities, biological instances, nonbiological instances, and specific nonbiological agents. It also outlines relational semantics, interaction norms, and mixed‑entity coordination patterns that support rigorous analysis of human–AI collaboration without relying on anthropomorphic or substrate‑specific assumptions. The IEF is designed as a foundational conceptual tool for researchers, designers, and theorists working in cognitive science, human–AI interaction, sociotechnical systems, and emerging forms of mixed‑entity cognition. This preprint presents the core architecture, terminology, and motivating rationale for the framework.
Chad Botz (Mon,) studied this question.