A Short Orientation to the Identity-Persistence Program

Abstract The Identity-Persistence Program is a bounded research program centered on a single question: what licenses a claim that something remains the same through change? This orientation guide maps the current architecture of the program without introducing new formal results. It organizes the corpus into its formal core, architectural and boundary papers, applied scientific interpretations, engineering infrastructure, and open research frontier while making explicit the dependency relations between them. The guide reflects the program’s current architecture: three forcing theorems—for identity, admissibility, and sufficient regime specification—form the formal core. The sufficient regime specification theorem forces the structural floor required for bounded independent evaluators to reach the same persistence or admissibility verdict under shared assumptions; identity and admissibility are presented as corresponding substructures within that forced floor. Capacity, coding, verification, and engineering consequences are situated downstream of this architecture while remaining explicitly separated from the mathematical results. The guide also records the program’s current status, distinguishing structural results, class-bounded closures, derived architectural interpretations, refuted claims, explicit non-claims, and genuinely open problems. Its purpose is to provide a stable entry point into the corpus, preserve claim-status discipline, and clarify the architectural relationships among the program’s formal, applied, and engineering components.