The Generative Lossy Channel: Five Sufficient Conditions for Net-Beneficial Noise

Capstone theory bridging AI and organizational series. Proves that organizational dysfunction and creative emergence are the same mechanism: any communication channel with preference divergence is endogenously lossy; any lossy reconstruction maintaining coherence must diverge from the source. This divergence — the generative residual — produces dysfunction under convergent selection and novelty under divergent selection. Version 2.0: Merged with former Paper 10 (Compression, Selection, and Organizational Self-Deception). Now includes substrate-independence argument (cognition, organizations, AI, academia), Ratchet mechanism formalized as Proposition 2.5, three self-referential examples replaced with external evidence (Berliner/Pressing on jazz, Vaughan on Challenger, Perez/Sharma on sycophancy).