Interpretive Discipline Under Stress: Reactive Substrate Theory and the Limits of Computational, Digital, and Informational Ontologies

This essay examines a recurring pattern in contemporary foundations of physics and cognitive science: the silent elevation of descriptive formalisms into ontological commitments. Reactive Substrate Theory (RST) is introduced as a constraint framework designed not to replace existing theories, but to enforce physical admissibility when interpretation drifts beyond finite, operational support.

1. The Problem Is Not Prediction — It Is Interpretation

Modern physics is extraordinarily successful at prediction. Quantum mechanics, general relativity, and thermodynamics map initial conditions to observable outcomes with unmatched precision. The persistent difficulties arise elsewhere: in how those mathematical structures are read.

Across multiple research programs — computational physics, digital ontology, information-based theories of mind — a recurring interpretive slide appears:

From useful description → physical identity
From formal continuability → physical realizability
From definability → ontological fundamentality

Reactive Substrate Theory exists precisely to prevent these slides from quietly hardening into ontology.

2. What Reactive Substrate Theory Is (and Is Not)

RST is not a predictive physical theory. It does not introduce new fields, modify existing equations, or compete with GR, QM, or thermodynamics.

Instead, RST operates along an orthogonal methodological axis:

Predictive theories map states to outcomes
RST constrains which interpretations of those mappings are physically admissible

Its non-negotiable commitments are minimal but strict:

Finite response
Irreversible dissipation
Environment-dependent dynamics
Operationally grounded time

Nothing speculative is added. What exceeds these constraints is filtered out — not as false mathematics, but as physically inadmissible interpretation.

3. Three RST Gate Checks

To enforce interpretive discipline, RST introduces gate checks: criteria that any ontological reading must satisfy to remain physically meaningful.

Gate Check 1: Substrate-Independence

Question: Does the claim remain meaningful if the physical substrate is changed or ignored?

Computational and informational frameworks often assume that implementation details do not matter: the “same computation” or “same information” is treated as physically equivalent across substrates.

RST rejects this move. Finite systems differ in dissipation pathways, coherence capacity, noise structure, and coupling — these are not incidental details but constitutive physical facts.

RST verdict: Substrate-independent descriptions may be mathematically useful. They do not, by themselves, define physical reality.

Gate Check 2: Reversibility “In Principle”

Question: Does the claim rely on reversibility achievable only through unphysical idealization?

Appeals to “reversibility in principle” often protect global unitarity or exact information conservation, even when reversal would require infinite precision, infinite isolation, or unlimited environmental control.

RST treats such appeals as formal, not physical. A process that cannot be reversed even in principle under finite dissipative conditions does not describe latent capability — it describes mathematical symmetry divorced from physical time.

RST verdict: Reversibility is a limiting description, not a physical entitlement.

Gate Check 3: Intrinsic Property Without Operational Support

Question: Is a property treated as physically intrinsic without operational realization?

In some theories of mind and information, quantities are described as “intrinsic” — existing independently of measurement, interaction, or coupling.

RST insists on a stricter criterion: physical properties must be grounded in finite, dissipative operational access. What cannot be registered, stabilized, or accessed by physical processes may exist formally, but not physically.

RST verdict: Intrinsic-as-formal can be admissible. Intrinsic-as-physical without operational grounding is not.

4. Comparison Without Polemic

RST is often misread as hostile to computational, digital, or informational approaches. It is not.

RST is compatible with:

Computational models as descriptions
Discrete models as approximations
Information measures as empirical correlates

What it blocks is the silent upgrade from description to ontology.

A parameter may be defined, a model may be useful, and a quantity may correlate — none of these, by themselves, license claims about what fundamentally exists.

5. Why This Often Feels Like “Splitting Hairs” — and Isn’t

Readers frequently object: “Physics works fine without this level of interpretive policing.”

That is correct — predictively. But interpretive contradictions arise precisely when mathematical success is mistaken for ontological license.

RST’s role is preventative: it intervenes before metaphysical commitments quietly accumulate under the cover of formal elegance.

6. When Would RST Actually Fail?

RST would be falsified not by new equations, but by interpretive necessity.

RST would fail if physics required:

Substrate-independent physical reality
Physically realizable global reversibility
Observer-free intrinsic properties without operational grounding

Absent such necessity, RST functions as a coherence-enforcing discipline rather than a competing worldview.

7. Closing Synthesis

Reactive Substrate Theory does not tell us what reality is made of. It tells us which stories we are allowed to tell about our equations without exceeding physical admissibility.

In a landscape increasingly dominated by powerful metaphors — computation, information, emergence — RST restores proportionality between mathematical description and physical constraint.

Interpretive freedom ends where finite, dissipative physical support ends.

Conspiranon

Reactive Substrate Theory and the Limits of Computational, Digital, and Informational Ontologies