Interlude

The Physical Account

Computation is physical, though not in the simple sense that every logical operation carries a fixed energetic price. Landauer identified a lower bound for logically irreversible erasure under specified conditions. Bennett showed why reversible organization matters. Contemporary systems operate far above that remote boundary, inside a more immediate economy of chips, memory movement, cooling, latency, utilization, and power delivery.

That account is less metaphysically satisfying than an energy theory of value and more useful. Training can be expensive because a particular capability requires experiments, data, hardware, labor, electricity, and time. Once produced, parts of the result may become cheap to reproduce, while deployment creates a fresh stream of costs. Past expenditure does not guarantee usefulness or prevent another route from reaching the same capability. It does establish that cognition, once industrialized, remains an activity with a material plant and an operating account.