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

Abstract

This document is the orientation guide to the Identity-Persistence Program, a research corpus developing a structural theory of sufficient regime specification for bounded observers. It does not introduce new mathematics or extend the forcing results of the corpus. Instead, it maps the dependency structure, claim status, reading order, and open problems of the completed first-generation program.

The guide organizes the corpus around three forcing results: the necessity of identity persistence, the admissibility conditions required for coherent identification, and the sufficient regime specification required for deterministic evaluation within a declared regime. It then distinguishes the subsequent structural-analysis layer from the forcing layer. That analysis now includes its first indexed closure through The Verdict Restriction, which characterizes verdict-relative role independence within the declared finite fragment while explicitly leaving broader questions of interaction, recoverability, specification equivalence, refinement, global normal forms, and machine verification open.

Throughout, the guide separates proven theorems, definitional constructions, derived consequences, conjectures, and open problems, providing a dependency map rather than an argumentative extension. It is intended as the primary entry point for readers approaching the corpus and as the reference architecture for future mathematical, philosophical, engineering, and applied work built upon it.