The Thermodynamics of Intelligence: Coherence Geometry and the Suppression of Combinatorial Explosion

Combinatorial explosion is the central computational bottleneck in high-dimensional systems. From cognition and protein folding to artificial intelligence and team performance, intelligent behavior hinges on the ability to avoid collapse under exponential growth in configuration space. We propose a thermodynamic theory of intelligence that frames this capacity as the real-time regulation of coherence under entropy flow.

We formalize a critical threshold, the dimensional hardness parameter Hd := Γ·τ / C(ρ)·log2 Deff, where Γ is entropy flow, τ is the coherence timescale, C(ρ) is the system’s coherence, and Deff is the effective dimensionality of the configuration space. When Hd <1, systems maintain structure and adaptivity; when Hd >1, they collapse. We demonstrate the applicability of this model to biological, artificial, and social systems, including protein misfolding, neural systems, AI hallucination, and decision collapse in high-stakes teams.