Overview
At a glance
- Information-exchange ontology
- Entropic asymmetry as ground
- First- vs. second-order form
- Threshold temporality
- Stated falsifiability conditions
This paper develops a structural distinction between first-order and second-order recursive exchange, and argues that entropic asymmetry is the condition giving recursive becoming its directionality.
Emergence is treated as work against a viscous medium: organization requires sustained energy input, while dissolution follows the gradient. The framework’s predictions are set against an existing measurement-layer result — a publication-first audit of a twelve-study cross-domain corpus — so the theoretical claims meet evidence rather than standing alone.
What it claims / What it does not claim
What it claims
Breadth. Directional, asymmetric signatures appear across material systems, and the available evidence is consistent with irreversibility functioning as a broad marker nesting a narrower entropy-production marker.
This breadth claim is the one the cross-domain audit bears on directly.
What it does not claim
Priority. That entropic asymmetry is metaphysically prior to other grounds is a theoretical commitment, not an empirical finding, and is not established by the audit.
Whether substrate-specificity reflects viscosity variation at the predicted level remains open and requires systematic investigation.
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