Informational Substrate Cosmology (ISC) The resolution arc: initialisation to exhaustion.

Informational Substrate Cosmology (ISC) proposes that the observable universe is a contingent informational expression hosted upon a non-geometric substrate. The substrate is not a layer beneath spacetime in any spatial or temporal sense; it is the condition for spacetime existing at all. Three minimal claims are made about it: that it is generative (expressions occur on it), non-familiar (geometric and temporal predicates do not apply), and content-stateless (no record of prior expression content is carried forward). Beyond these, no description is offered — language developed within spacetime cannot describe what lies outside it.

What standard cosmology calls the Big Bang, ISC reframes as a coding event: the establishment of a recipe — a specific configuration of physical laws and constants — expressed as the universe through to its exhaustion. What proceeds across an expression is named action: configurations standing in determinate relations to other configurations. Action is universal across recipes; the shape it takes is recipe-dependent. Time, in this framework, is the metric observers use to register sequenceable action within their expression; it is not a feature of expression as such. An expression that produces no observers has no time. Sequenceable and unsequenceable are observer-side categories; chaos, noise, and stochasticity are observer-side labels rather than features of action itself.

Our recipe’s action takes the form of a resolution arc: a five-state trajectory from pre-coherent dispersed information through the formation and decoherence of baryonic structure to post-coherent dispersion. The arc is operationalised as a four-fraction informational budget conserved across an arc parameter κ. Dark matter and dark energy are reframed as the sub-threshold and dispersed regimes of this budget rather than as separate ontological categories. The framework predicts zero non-gravitational coupling from the sub-threshold state, treats the cosmological inference Ω_dm ≈ 0.27 as a lower bound on global f_sub rather than as the value, and expects the deceleration-to-acceleration transition to be a structural feature of the action observers register as expansion history. Exhaustion returns the substrate to a condition ontologically identical to pre-initialisation, from which a new coding event can initiate.

ISC operates at two levels. Its ontological commitments — substrate, coding event, expression-statelessness, action proceeds, time as observer-side metric — are framework-level and not falsifiable in the strict Popperian sense. Specific claims about the dark sector, conservation, and the expansion history are falsifiable and stated as such. The framework is in development; quantitative predictions remain future work.