Semantic Physics: Status Document

There is a question that is rarely asked because it sounds too early. It lies beneath the familiar questions ofthe sciences and is normally skipped over because its answer looks like a presupposition rather than atopic. The question is this: How can something be separated and yet stand in relation? Not in theepistemic sense. Not in the linguistic sense. Not metaphorically. Physically. What must be the case so thatdifference can exist at all, without the sides either fusing or falling apart? The usual answer is: there areboundaries. Membranes, walls, interfaces, phase transitions. But this answer only displaces the questionone layer deeper, because a boundary that lets nothing through is not a difference — it is an end. And aboundary that lets everything through is not a boundary at all. The real question is not where theseparation runs but what carries it. What pays the cost of keeping a gradient in being? What expends thework that keeps the difference from collapsing toward the mean? The Second Law of thermodynamicssays that every gradient dissipates itself if left alone. Heat flows from hot to cold, concentrations equalise,tensions discharge. Everything in a closed system moves toward maximum entropy — toward the state inwhich nothing is distinguished from anything else any longer. The only reason there are structures at all— stars, cells, sentences, banks, attention — is that these structures are not closed. They exchange withtheir environment, they process energy, and they hold against diffusion. This holding is not trivial, and itis not free. A cell that holds its inside against its outside maintains a metabolism that costs work. Asentence that holds its sense against semantic noise demands cognitive effort from a speaker and a hearer.A bank that holds liquidity against a run requires trust, reserves, and architecture. An attention pattern thatcarries a context across a thousand tokens costs a transformer compute and structural coherence. Asynapse that holds a memory across decades sustains a metabolic and structural investment that ramifiesthrough the cell’s biochemistry. What if these were not five distinct phenomena that happen to share aturn of phrase? What if it were one operation, in five different substrates? This is the claim of SemanticPhysics. The claim is more radical than it first appears, because it requires that one take the word“meaning” — which we ordinarily reserve for linguistic or cognitive phenomena — seriously as aphysical quantity. Not as an eect, not as a representation, not as a symbol. As what occurs when a systemholds a difference against diffusion. Meaning is held gradient under cost. It lives wherever somethingdoes the work to carry a contrast. This shift looks like a definition but is something stronger. It is anattempt to install a missing layer between the physics of energy and the phenomenology of sense. Physicsdescribes how energy flows. Information theory describes how bits are transmitted. But between energyand information lies a region neither addresses: the question of what is held, how it is held, and when itcollapses. SP places itself in that region.