On Staying Alive: Self-Reference, Entropy, and the Need for an Engine
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 20, 2026 Kimiyasu Igarashi
A self-referential system that folds its history onto a single direction inevitably drifts toward a degenerate state where its entropy collapses to zero: it keeps changing but stops becoming anything new. This collapse is proposed as a formal analogue of death, defined not as cessation but as loss of capacity to become otherwise. A second channel, responsive only to current external input and not to accumulated history, prevents the collapse and stabilizes the system between frozen and formless extremes. Self-reference alone generates privacy or internality, but something like self-maintenance is needed to keep that private state from collapsing into repetitive sameness.