An Introduction to Continuity Science:Bringing Existing Fields Together to Explore Personal Information and Conscious Continuity

Could surviving physical information support the reconstruction of a temporally specific person, and would such a reconstruction preserve the original person’s conscious experience? This personal, non-peer-reviewed introductory paper proposes Continuity Science as a working name for bringing existing fields together to investigate what persists, changes, or is lost in a person over time, including the stronger question of whether conscious experience could continue through substantial physical change. It connects neuroscience, memory research, information theory, biological ageing, computational modelling, and philosophy of mind; it does not establish a new discipline or report a new discovery. It distinguishes biological identification, recovery of acquired information, functional reconstruction, and first-person continuity. These outcomes require different evidence and must not be treated as interchangeable. Established research on epigenetic age, memory engrams and neural decoding motivates limited questions about information persistence; it does not establish that detached tissue, individual atoms, or other microscopic units preserve autobiographical memory. A hierarchy of hypotheses and a twenty-step programme are proposed, with explicit controls, conditional progression, and stopping criteria. A prospective test using randomly assigned learning material illustrates how a narrow claim could be investigated without presupposing person reconstruction. The ultimate motivation is to understand whether conscious continuity could survive substantial physical change or reconstruction. No current result presented here demonstrates that possibility. The proposed contribution is a framework for deciding which parts of that ambition can become testable and which remain unresolved.