Identity Preservation as the Foundation of Persistent Reality - Why every science of enduring things already presupposes a theory of identity

Abstract

A foundations paper in the La Profilée programme. It argues that every science of enduring objects already presupposes an ontology of identity before it can formulate an ontology of matter, energy, information, or life — and that persistence, treated as basic by every such science, is on analysis not basic at all, but diachronic identity: the continued satisfaction of an identity criterion across real transformation. The structural architecture of that criterion is derived in The Structural Law of Everything That Persists (Maibom 2026, doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21459294). This paper does not re-derive it. The two are complementary: this paper establishes why such an architecture is unavoidable — why any science of persisting things has already assumed one — while the foundational work derives what the architecture is. It makes the presupposition explicit; the foundational work supplies its structure. 1. The question sciences do not ask A science begins by asking what its objects are made of, how they change, what laws they obey. Physics asks what matter and energy are and how they transform. Biology asks what living systems are built from and how they reproduce. Information theory asks what a state is and how much of it a channel carries. These are different questions with different answers, and each discipline has spent centuries refining its own. Underneath all of them lies a question none of them asks, because each has already answered it before its own inquiry can begin. Before a science can ask what something is made of, it has already assumed that there is something that remains the same — some object, system, or quantity that endures long enough to be made of anything, to change into anything, to carry anything. The atom that gains and loses electrons is still that atom. The organism whose every molecule is replaced across its life is still that organism. The message that survives noise is still that message. In each case the science speaks of one thing across a change, and in doing so it has taken for granted that there is a fact of the matter about whether the thing after the change is the thing before it. This is not a marginal assumption. It is the condition under which the science has any object to be about at all. A physics with no persisting carriers would have nothing for its equations to range over; a biology with no enduring organisms would have nothing to explain; an information theory with no stable distinguishable states would have no information. The assumption is prior to the content of each field, and it is the same assumption in every one of them: that identity can be preserved through real change. This paper is about that assumption — what it is, why it is deeper than what the sciences take to be fundamental, and why it is not, as it first appears, a claim about persistence at all.