Flagship research program

The Persistence Initiative

A planned open-source research program for turning an extraordinary question into a disciplined sequence of definitions, methods, critiques, and evidence standards.

Program mandate

Make persistence claims scientifically legible.

The Persistence Initiative asks what it would mean for a human subject to continue across a change of substrate, which observations could bear on that claim, and which alternatives could explain the same observations.

It is a research agenda, not a clinical program, preservation service, or claim that transfer has been accomplished.

Proposed workstreams

A program built around failure modes

PI—A

Definitions & models

Compare identity criteria and predictions for branching, interruption, gradual replacement, and reconstruction.

PI—B

Evidence & observability

Determine what neural and computational measurements support without overinterpreting behavioral equivalence.

PI—C

Adversarial protocols

Develop thought experiments, simulations, and later empirical protocols designed to separate persistence from imitation.

PI—D

Ethics & claim governance

Study consent, welfare, identity conflict, public communication, and standards for correction or retraction.

Proposed research sequence

Claims narrow before evidence accumulates.

1State the continuity claim

2List rival explanations

3Identify discriminating evidence

4Precommit to failure criteria

5Invite independent criticism

Program status: Foundational planning. No active experiments, study recruitment, results, or completion timeline are being announced.

A valid outcome

The answer may remain no—or unknown.

A rigorous program must allow evidence to weaken the case for continuity, reveal that proposed tests cannot discriminate, or show that a question is not presently tractable.

Clarifying those limits would be progress. The Initiative will not define success as reaching a predetermined conclusion.