A Top-Down Framework for the Spontaneous Emergence of Digital Communication Systems from Non-Equilibrium Chemistry: How NDE-Based Thermodynamic Filtering and Fröhlich Condensation Overcome the Shannon Boundary for the Origin of Life

This paper addresses one of the central unsolved problems in origin-of-life research: how a digital communication system could emerge from non-living chemistry. For seventy years, bottom-up approaches have produced important chemical building blocks, but no self-organizing encoder-message-decoder system satisfying the Shannon boundary has been experimentally produced from abiotic chemistry.

The paper argues that the search direction must be inverted. Instead of asking which chemical reaction produced the genetic code, it asks what physical constraint landscape could force chemistry into a coding architecture. This is the Information-First paradigm: physical information structure constrains chemistry into code-compatible configurations. The claim is not intelligent design; “information” here means physical, thermodynamic, measurable information in the Landauer-Wheeler sense.

The paper identifies six fundamental barriers to spontaneous code emergence: analog-to-digital transition, encoder-decoder circularity, arbitrary mapping fixation, thermodynamic ordering, functional meaning assignment, and simultaneous emergence of encoder, message, and decoder. Each barrier is paired with a physical resolution: molecular bistability, autocatalytic closure, feedback-driven lock-in, non-equilibrium energy flow, differential persistence, and self-referential topology.

The central theoretical contribution is a top-down thermodynamic model in which code emergence is not a lucky chemical accident but the attractor of a driven non-equilibrium system. Under sustained energy flow, weak stereochemical biases and autocatalytic closure are amplified into stable digital mappings. In this framework, “meaning” does not need to be externally assigned; it emerges when certain mappings persist because they produce thermodynamically or catalytically favored outputs.

The computational layer implements a 64-state encoder-message-decoder architecture corresponding to triplet coding. Seven deterministic simulations test the proposed pathway across the six barriers and the integrated system. The resulting architecture reaches approximately 88% of the theoretical Shannon channel capacity, showing that a physically constrained non-equilibrium system can approach digital communication behavior without external programming or post-hoc symbolic interpretation.

The paper also introduces an experimental detection strategy adapted from nuclear non-destructive evaluation. The origin-of-code problem is treated as a signal-detection problem inside noisy prebiotic chemistry: the task is to detect whether a deterministic input-output mapping emerges from stochastic molecular dynamics. Proposed empirical routes include mass spectrometry, fluorescence tagging, and statistical tests against random chemical baselines.

The conclusion is that the genetic code should not be modeled as a frozen accident produced by chemistry alone. Within the stated framework, chemistry is selected by code-compatible thermodynamic constraints. The paper therefore reframes abiogenesis as the spontaneous emergence of a digital communication system under non-equilibrium physical law. Its result is theoretical and computational, not yet wet-lab validation, but it provides a falsifiable architecture for testing whether physical chemistry can cross the Shannon boundary.

Keywords: abiogenesis, origin of life, genetic code, Information-First paradigm, Shannon communication, encoder-decoder system, digital code emergence, non-equilibrium chemistry, thermodynamic filtering, autocatalytic closure, molecular bistability, Landauer principle, dissipative structures, Shannon capacity, NDE-based detection, Information Physics Series.