Devin Bostick
Abstract This orientation presents the architecture, results, boundaries, and reading paths of the Identity-Persistence Program, a research program on the structural conditions under which bounded evaluators can make reproducible judgments of identity, persistence, admissibility, and verification under declared regimes. The program’s foundational layer establishes three forcing results: structural floors for coherent identity claims, admissible transformation, and sufficient regime specification. These are bracketed below by the requirement that cumulative inquiry possess a stable same/not-same criterion and above by an identification ceiling: within the finite declared class, admissible evidence identifies only up to the declared quotient. The guide then maps the program’s post-floor structural theory. For a declared question family, maximal structure-compatible safe congruences yield canonical demand-relative normal forms and a theory of regime equivalence and refinement. Recurrence is classified in the one-degree homogeneous case; symmetry reduction is separated from operable quotient structure through an independent-redescription compatibility criterion; nested regimes compose through backward demand propagation and forward certificate compression; and reconstructibility, blocking cuts, and verification complexity are characterized at the mechanization layer. Condensation Dynamics adds a finite dynamical theory in which safe quotienting has an exact potential and path-independent total budget, interaction defects measure noncanonical allocation, serial nesting obeys a no-free-acceleration law, and structural conditions for zero defect are identified. The orientation also distinguishes these theorem-bearing results from the program’s finite-interior analyses of interaction, omission, representation, and declaration dependence; from interpretive accounts of endogenous regime formation; and from downstream runtime engineering. The resulting architecture is not a claim about final ontology or unrestricted knowledge. It is a class-relative theory of what bounded evaluators can license, preserve, compress, compose, and independently verify once the governing regime has been sufficiently declared. Corpus-native instantiation, selected extension classes, and independent formal proof verification remain open. This document proves no new theorem. It is the program guide: it records dependency structure, claim status, scope boundaries, and reading order, while the individual papers remain authoritative for their results.