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 program’s current architecture without introducing new formal results. It organizes the corpus into its formal core, architectural and boundary papers, applied interpretations, engineering infrastructure, and open research frontier while making explicit the dependency relations between them. The guide reflects the mature structure of the program: three forcing theorems—for identity, admissibility, and sufficient regime specification—form the formal core, while The Root of the Demand conditionally grounds the verdict demand beneath the sufficiency theorem. 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 correspond as roles within that forced floor. Capacity, coding, verification, and engineering consequences are situated downstream and kept separate 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 open problems. It introduces the current frontier as two-sided: an algebra of regime specifications above the forced floor, and a conditionally grounded demand beneath it whose residual co-declaration binding is closure-exempt. 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.