Abstract This report constitutes Part I of the Information Folding Geometry (IFG) Phase 1 investigation. We conduct a rigorous self-consistency analysis of the foundational claim that the dimensional hierarchy 0D → 1D → 2D → 3D corresponds monotonically to increasing information capacity. Employing the Fisher information volume as the canonical measure of information capacity, we establish that the hierarchy holds for flat, regular Riemannian manifolds equipped with Gaussian measures, where IC (ℝⁿ, gEucl, γₙ) = (2πe) ^n/2 is strictly monotone in n. We then demonstrate that the hierarchy fails for compact manifolds: the volume of the unit n-sphere vol (Sⁿ) peaks at n = 6 and decreases to zero as n → ∞, constituting a falsification of the naive dimensional hierarchy in the compact setting. We further derive that the proposed Information Folding Operator F: M → M′ cannot be a smooth map when it changes the topology of the underlying manifold, and we resolve this obstruction by recasting F as a morphism in the category of Whitney-stratified spaces or as a Lagrangian correspondence in the symplectic cotangent bundle. Finally, we prove that folding generically reduces information capacity via the data-processing inequality, and we introduce the augmented information capacity ICₐug to restore monotonicity by tracking the fold locus ΣF. All four logical contradictions identified in the preliminary framework are resolved, and a formal contradiction resolution table is provided. Keywords: information geometry, Fisher information metric, information folding operator, stratified spaces, Lagrangian correspondence, data-processing inequality, effective dimension, Whitney stratification.
Sun et al. (2026) studied this question.