Abstract We investigate the minimal structural conditions under which representational accessibility and irreversibility-like asymmetry arise in physical description. Starting solely from the existence of distinguishable states and a class of admissible transformations, we analyze how accessibility of distinctions changes under non-injective representational updates without introducing prior notions of space, time, probability, measurement, or thermodynamic structure.Admissible non-injective transformations naturally induce equivalence relations on the state space, leading to a distinction between manifest difference, corresponding to representationally accessible distinctions, and latent difference, corresponding to distinctions that remain structurally present but inaccessible within a given representation. We show that accessibility and recoverability of distinctions are determined intrinsically by the admissible transformation structure itself rather than by externally imposed observational limitations or representational scales.A central result of the framework is that irreversibility-like asymmetry arises when latent distinctions become non-recoverable within the admissible transformation class. In this perspective, irreversibility-like behavior is interpreted not as a consequence of probabilistic uncertainty or thermodynamic entropy increase, but as a structural restriction on recoverability of representational accessibility.The present work does not introduce new mathematical constructions. Rather, it provides a conceptual reinterpretation of equivalence structures, representational accessibility, and recoverability within a minimal framework of physical description. This framework identifies structural preconditions for accessibility restriction and recoverability failure prior to the introduction of statistical, thermodynamic, or observer-dependent assumptions.
Yasuaki Tamura (Sun,) studied this question.