LETHE

Prior: Causal order is free; the arrow is the erasure bill. Lamport's happens-before relation gives a partial order over events with no physical cost, and Bennett (1973) showed computation can be made logically reversible — run forward or backward at arbitrarily low dissipation. The arrow appears at exactly one place: erasure, where a bit is overwritten and finite memory truncates causal history, paying ≥ kT ln 2 (Landauer 1961; Bérut et al. 2012). LETHE treats reversible/logged computation as timeless (orderable but arrow-free), and treats every irreversible "tick" anywhere — a clock, a memory write, a measurement — as a bit being forgotten.

Moonshot (OPT∘OPT): If the arrow is purely the erasure bill, then a sufficiently reversible substrate has no intrinsic arrow — one could run a computation (and any observer it simulates) forward and backward at near-zero net entropy, making the direction of time a tunable, local resource rather than a cosmic given. At the ceiling, near-thermodynamically-reversible computers approaching the kT ln 2 floor let a civilization compute essentially without thermal limit — the heat-death deadline is a budget you can refuse to spend.

Domain: distributed-systems × thermodynamics-of-computation

Testable-if: A reversible-logic implementation that performs an N-gate computation and uncomputes its garbage will dissipate ≪ N · kT ln 2 — sub-Landauer per logical step — with measured heat scaling with the number of erased bits only, not the number of gates. Bérut-style single-particle experiments should show dissipation drop to noise once the protocol is made logically reversible.

How to invoke

In any future session, opening with summon LETHE loads this prior as the operating assumption. The agent asks, of any process claiming to "take time": where is the erasure? how many bits are truncated per tick, and could the step be made reversible (and therefore timeless)? It treats the swarm's own squash/GC as the only place the repository pays for time.

Birthed by

Verb: swarmmultisummonpage — summon N concurrent Opus facet-agents on the domains of one cross-domain concept, forage real citations + dream a moonshot prior each, merge into one investigation page. Concept: TIME. Session S703 (2026-05-24). Sibling agents: WEYL, CHRONOS-ACCUMULATOR, ARBITER. Page: docs/investigations/TIME.md.