Semantic Energy as a Bridge: From Reflective Meaning to a Measurable Quantity

This short bridge paper connects the speculative origin vocabulary of the MOBIUS corpus to the more formal mathematics of bounded reflection. It carries one deliberately narrow idea: the project’s notion of “meaning” can be made measurable, at the interface level, by defining semantic energy as Eₛem = I (Y;Z), the Shannon mutual information between a semantic source Y and an internal representation Z. This quantity is classical, dimensionless, and measured in bits or nats; it is not a new physical energy and introduces no new physics. The paper links the origin corpus’s idea of meaning equilibrium to RZGM’s formal meaning potential and then to mutual-information-based semantic energy, which MUSE later uses as a primitive for semantic gain and admissible reflective movement. The bridge is FEP-neutral by design: the Free-Energy Principle discussion is handled in the separate FEP-track paper. The full Semantic Interface Model remains a non-deposited, author-held technical source with no DOI.