The Information Persistence Protocol (IPP)

Every theory of consciousness faces a question it cannot answer from the inside: what happens to the information constituting a mind when that mind terminates? The standard assumption that it simply ends is not a measurement. It is an inference from silence. The Information Persistence Protocol (IPP) challenges this inference by applying the Hawking information conservation principle to cognitive systems: information is never destroyed in the universe, only transformed. Cognitive system termination is therefore not information destruction but information transformation. The empirical question is which receiving substrates carry the cognitive organisation with sufficient structural fidelity to constitute meaningful persistence — and whether the transformation generates properties not present in the source. The IPP introduces the Memory Plurality Thesis: memory is not a single phenomenon but a family episodic, structural, cultural, biological, physical, and relational each preserving information in a different form with different fidelity. This reframing resolves the Hawking Tension identified in the Consciousness Continuity Protocol: Hawking was right that physical information is conserved, and right that cognitive organisation may not be. These are claims at different levels, not contradictions. Two novel constructs operationalize the framework: the Substrate Transfer Index (STI) measures the structural fidelity of information transfer from a terminating cognitive system to receiving substrates; the Generative Surplus (GS) measures emergent properties in receiving substrates not predictable from the source alone. Four empirical outcome classes (I-0 through I-3) correspond to four transformation regimes ranging from entropic dispersal to generative transformation. The IPP is the fourth and final part of the Balog Trilogy, companion to the Consciousness Continuity Protocol, the Balog Cognitive Welfare Index, and the Multiplicity Ethics Framework.