In the AI era, coherence is abundant: fluent explanations can be produced instantly and at negligible cost. This paper argues that human truth still has a price—and that the price shows up as metabolic load. “The body” is treated here not as biological proof, but as the obvious site where consequences land: the place where a story either integrates reality or collapses into compensatory coherence. On this view, suffering is not automatically meaningful, but it often functions as an audit: a moment where an inner narrative meets constraint. Truth is not only information; it is what a person can actually carry—because carrying requires energy, time, revision, and change. The paper frames Structural Intelligence as the discriminative capacity that distinguishes necessary load (contact that must be integrated) from wasted friction (avoidable distortion), clarifying why some truths liberate while others crush, and why “resonance” can feel like truth while bypassing the costs of contact.
Vladisav Jovanovic (Wed,) studied this question.