History-Conditioned Future Distinguishability in EEG: From an Empirical Boundary to a Falsifiable Test of Whether Neural History Remains Informative Beyond the Present State

This work introduces History-Conditioned Future Distinguishability as an operational framework for testing whether preceding EEG trajectory retains near-future information after observations have first been made similar under a declared representation of their present state. The study begins from an executed real-EEG pilot in the CHB-MIT Scalp EEG Database. The original five-minute history representation did not demonstrate reliable predictive benefit and is retained here as a negative/inconclusive empirical boundary rather than reinterpreted as a positive result. Motivated by that boundary, the manuscript defines a stricter falsifiable experiment. A 10-second present state is matched without access to future labels; the preceding five-minute EEG history is represented as five ordered one-minute phases; the present-state matching graph is frozen before outcomes are revealed; and temporal order is selectively destroyed while historical content is preserved. Patient-level inference and temporally structured null models are specified prospectively. This Version 1.0 records the empirical boundary, the formal hypothesis, the primary matched-state statistic, the independent confirmation architecture, and its pre-result adversarial falsification criteria before any signal-derived confirmation outcome is claimed. The next stage of this research program will report the independent empirical evaluation of the prospectively specified hypothesis on the reserved confirmation cohort. That analysis will test whether history-conditioned future distinguishability is detectable in independent EEG data and whether any observed effect survives the prespecified temporal-order, patient-level, recording-level, and nuisance controls. The outcome remains deliberately open: failure of the frozen criteria will be reported as failure to confirm the hypothesis at the tested resource level. The broader question is one of state sufficiency: when the observable present has been made similar, can the path into that present still distinguish what happens next? This work is methodological and retrospective. It does not establish biological memory, causal neural mechanisms, clinical seizure prediction, or empirical confirmation of ψ-Architecture, and it is not intended for diagnosis or treatment.