Persistence Across Scales: An Exploratory Architectural Interpretation Under Regime-Relative Identity

Abstract Persistence Across Scales is a speculative companion to the Identity-Persistence Program. It asks whether persistent structures across selected physical and organizational scales can be compared using one ordered set of questions: what is the identity-bearing unit, which transformations are admissible, what structure must be preserved, what tolerance and exit conditions apply, and under which criterion a persistence verdict is rendered. The paper does not propose a physical theory, derive new equations, or claim that nature itself declares regimes or renders verdicts. For natural systems it therefore distinguishes coherence domains from declared regimes: stars, cells, organisms, institutions, computers, and artificial agents may exhibit constitutive dynamics, enabling conditions, and evaluator-relative criteria of persistence, but those relations are not assumed to share one mechanism. The discussion explores four deliberately non-theorem-level extensions of the formal vocabulary: maintenance across surrounding conditions, quotient-like loss of lower-level detail, the formation of new domains through generation and filtering, and a possible relation between maintenance capacity, imposed drift, and persistence time. Each remains OPEN. Nested composition is treated only as an architectural possibility: structures identified at one level may become candidate units in higher-level descriptions, but no universal cross-scale composition law is asserted. Artificial intelligence provides the least metaphorical case because declared specifications can exist as versioned engineering artifacts. The paper examines bounded autonomous regime formation as candidate generation and revision under an inherited meta-regime, not unrestricted self-definition. It also identifies an ontological pull: once admitted operational tests are saturated, intrinsic identity may become easy to confuse with successfully specified operational identity. The formal limit is narrower—exhaustion of admitted tests does not establish identity beyond their quotient—while the associated claim about human practice remains conjectural and empirically untested. The paper is permanently outside the formal dependency graph. It proves and derives nothing, licenses no verdict, and supplies no empirical prediction. Its purpose is to map the maximum interpretive reach of the framework while stating precisely what mathematics and evidence would be required for successor work to become scientific.