Energetic Cost of Erasure

Axiom A4 is an interpretive postulate / research hypothesis (dated 2025-12-23), not an empirically established law. ASH invokes the Landauer erasure bound as a constrained physical analogy; it does not claim that every informational or narrative pattern is physically instantiated.

Formal Statement (Landauer’s Bound)

In an idealized isothermal memory with an optimal reset protocol, erasing a variable X with Shannon entropy H(X) bits dissipates at least k_BT ln(2) H(X) joules of heat. Structured, low-entropy patterns therefore carry a thermodynamic cost to destroy — subject to these model assumptions.

In the ASH Model

The canonical doubly-even [9,4,4] transform code offers a constrained analogy for erasure-resistance rather than a demonstrated self-healing dynamic. Error correction is a property of an explicit radius-1 nearest-codeword decoder, not of the simulations: when invoked it corrects every single-bit corruption (144 across all 512 states) and rejects every two-bit corruption (576 rejected, never silently healed). The Markov simulations apply noise and code XORs but never decode.