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Six Birds: No-Go Theorems for Audited Emergence
Eight things an emergence story cannot honestly claim in a finite model.
In plain words
Take a finite system watched through a lens. Define its arrow of time as the gap between the law of a path and the law of the same path reversed.
Watching cannot increase the arrow. So a reversible system started at rest shows zero arrow no matter how cleverly you watch it, even if the watching supports interesting protocol structure.
Other theorems: force like drives are exact on forests, a variational identity for the best macro kernel, and a saturation result that stops unbounded laddering.
What it shows
- A data processing inequality for the arrow audit.
- Graph obstructions for antisymmetric drives.
- A bounded interface saturation theorem.
What it does not claim
Results hold for finite Markov systems and deterministic lenses.
Cite
Tsiokos, I. (2026). Six Birds: No-Go Theorems for Audited Emergence. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19187777