What Licenses Sameness Through Change? A Short Orientation to the Identity-Persistence Program Toward a Structural Theory of Regime Specification

Abstract What licenses the judgment that something remains the same through change? The Identity-Persistence Program begins from the claim that, for a bounded evaluator, such a judgment cannot rely silently on an identity relation, a complete description, or an unrestricted standpoint. It requires a sufficiently specified regime: a declared structure fixing what is being tracked, which distinctions are licensed, which transformations are admissible, what evidence is retained, and what licenses a verdict. This Orientation provides the entry point and dependency map for the resulting research program. Across owner papers carrying different formal grades and scopes, the program establishes a forced specification floor; develops finite and compact-metric results for persistence, capacity, and coding; places finite identification beneath an explicit resolution ceiling; and characterizes the boundary at which a demanded verdict ceases to be derivable from the currently licensed distinctions. At that boundary, the exact informational obstruction and canonical minimum repair can be identified. The program’s realization branch then asks whether a restricted, authorized supply of acquisition channels can actually provide the required distinction. At finite declared scope it distinguishes exact realization, realization with excess revelation, supported demand narrowing, and refusal. Its dynamic extension shows when acquisition order affects the resulting demand or disclosure history, separates demand confluence from revelation confluence, and computes the minimum provenance required by a declared revelation audit. Other branches study regime algebra, refinement and forgetting, verification, transformation normal forms, interaction and omission, commensuration between regimes, endogenous interface synthesis, and persistence across directed networks. No single theorem spans this complete architecture: some transitions are forced, some proved within declared classes, and others are derived orderings, fences, interpretations, or open problems. The program does not declare which identity relation is ultimately correct. It identifies what must be made explicit before bounded judgments of sameness, persistence, admissibility, consequence, realization, or verification can be well posed and independently assessed. This Orientation proves no new theorem. It states the architecture, claim-status grammar, dependency order, evaluation contract, open boundaries, and routes into the formal corpus; mathematical authority remains with the cited owner papers.