Engram Identity Collapse

This paper introduces Engram Identity Collapse, a negative ontology for the failure modes of substrate‑rooted identity primitives in organized systems. Building on the SEBA identity decomposition 1, the axioms of identity preservation 2, the system‑level collapse taxonomy 3, collapse anticipation 8, and human interpretive divergence 4–7, it formalizes how identity primitives—commitment objects, provenance chains, semantic bindings, and interpretive trajectories—drift, bifurcate, and collapse independently of system identity. The work defines five primitive‑level collapse modes (commitment collapse, provenance‑chain collapse, substrate‑root collapse, semantic collapse, interpretive collapse), analyzes their propagation dynamics, establishes collapse thresholds and invariants, and integrates them with the broader identity doctrine. The result is a complete negative ontology for identity primitives, enabling identity‑conditioned governance, provenance integrity, and system assurance in substrate‑rooted architectures.