Topology-Selective Physical Memory: When Environmental History Acquires Chemical Consequences

Biological information is usually studied in systems that already possess replication, templating, or heredity. This work asks an earlier question: can a nonliving physical substrate selectively retain information about its environmental history, and can that retained history subsequently alter chemistry?

This paper introduces topology-selective physical memory (TSPM): the differential persistence of information about environmental history produced by the interaction architecture of a physical system. Using the 32-state, five-site energetic substrate of the Adaptive Mineral Encoding Framework (AMEF), environmental histories are written into physical state distributions and allowed to relax under explicit single-site Metropolis dynamics.

The model produces a four-stage architecture:

WRITE → FILTER → PRESERVE → EXECUTE

Interaction topology predicts which environmental directions persist. The favored (+,−,+,−,+) environmental direction is nearly collinear with the dominant cooperative eigenmode of the pairwise interaction matrix (|cos θ| = 0.9967). Across a 2,112-condition orientation sweep, coupling selectively enhances or suppresses memory depending on environmental direction rather than generically increasing persistence.

When favored and disfavored components are written simultaneously, differential relaxation progressively changes the composition of retained information. The ratio of their fractional retention reaches 2.07 after five Monte Carlo steps and 3.86 after ten, demonstrating topology-dependent filtering of a mixed environmental history.

A synthetic downstream readout further shows that retained historical information can alter later outcomes under identical external conditions. Scrambling the association between environmental history and retained physical state abolishes downstream historical information, demonstrating that the modeled effect depends on the history-state correspondence rather than heterogeneous state occupancy alone.

TSPM does not claim that physical memory, chemical memory, or mineral-carried environmental history are themselves new phenomena. Rather, it proposes a specific mechanism by which the internal interaction topology of a nonliving substrate can select which components of environmental history survive relaxation and remain available to influence subsequent chemistry.

Greigite (Fe₃S₄) is treated as a candidate experimental substrate rather than a demonstrated implementation. The numerical model uses DFT-informed toy parameters and dimensionless Monte Carlo time; the downstream chemical readout is hypothetical. The work therefore establishes a theoretical mechanism and falsifiable experimental prediction, not empirical demonstration of TSPM in greigite.

This study is a successor to the original Adaptive Mineral Encoding Framework and develops a distinct theory of selective physical memory rather than superseding the earlier work.

Central proposition: Information begins when history acquires consequences.