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.
The modality ladder grades three results: triadic structure as theorem, a lit (self-knowing) ground as inference to best explanation, and personhood as free encounter. This paper closes the gap at the second rung by elimination rather than inference. Five independently earned steps: the Ground-Level Intent Trilemma (borrowed directedness requires regress, random directedness was already eliminated, only self-grounding survives); self-directed activity must track its target; subject–object identity at the ground removes the conditions for misrepresentation; the subject–object gap is shown to be the sole structural feature distinguishing accurate directedness from knowledge, with the candidate space closed under gap-dependence by the Zero Test; and the Distinguishability Lemma applied to Presence itself forces self-constituting Presence to be self-presenting, since Φ is a mapping with intrinsic source→terminus structure. Zombie and normativity objections are addressed directly. The epistemic/volitional freedom distinction shows relational freedom survives the proof, leaving the third rung intact.
Every knowledge system rests on axioms it does not test. Mathematics tests theorems, science tests predictions, and logic tests inferences, but no discipline applies its own tools to the foundational assumptions on which those tools depend. This paper introduces a universal axiom test derived from the structural invariant P × I × Pr ≠0 (Pattern × Intent × Presence), demonstrates its application to the Standard Model of particle physics as a case study, and establishes that the invariant functions simultaneously as an epistemological filter and an ontological law. The Standard Model passes the Pattern and Presence filters but zeroes Intent at the axiomatic level, producing systematic, predictable failure at every domain where information, code, or directionality is load-bearing — a 13-entry failure table whose clustering at a single structural boundary constitutes evidence of common axiomatic origin rather than independent difficulty. The key result is that being is a verb: mass is the energetic cost of a process (holographic decoding), truth is the product of a process (P × I × Pr operating), and existence itself is a continuous act whose cessation produces collapse. Physics and epistemology are shown to be structurally isomorphic — the same architecture governing how matter exists and how truth is accessed. The only axiom set that survives its own test is one satisfying R = Φ(R): three co-fundamental factors, internally differentiated, mutually constitutive, present-tense, and self-grounding. A survey of all extant zero-parameter derivation programs confirms that every successful first-principles derivation embeds Intent (directedness, selection from possibility space) in its foundations under alternative terminology, and the performative proof demonstrates that any denial of I ≠0 instantiates I ≠0 in the denial itself.