Public Reality
The main question

What is the threshold of existence?

Being has no threshold. Being a fact does. The quantum state, including the private remainder underneath, is real at every level, and nothing switches it on. What has a threshold is facthood: having one definite value that independent parties can find without disturbing it.

In the abstract, the threshold is about who can read, not about any substance. A single holder can keep a full quantum secret. Two holders that share nothing cannot: whatever both can recover is forced to commute, and commuting quantities follow one ordinary probability law. So a fact is whatever every half of the world can read. Every majority is one step too weak, because quantum secrets can still live there.

Entropy is not what existence is. It is what facthood costs, the gate that admits or refuses it, and the way facts end. Copies spend blank capacity. A bath at equilibrium decoheres but writes nothing. A fact dies when its correlation moves from small pieces of the world to only large ones, which is exactly what a horizon does.

The threshold, stated

The formal version

From possibility to permanent fact

The ladder

Each rung adds one condition. Public existence starts where the gold line crosses.

    The missing relationship

    Entropy is the price and the clock

    A fact is an entropy deficit
    [W(1−δ) − 1]·H ≤ Σχk − H ≤ TC ≤ β(F − Feq)

    Writing W independent copies of an H-bit fact uses up correlation measured against equilibrium. Facts sit below equilibrium; a maximum-entropy world keeps only conserved charges.

    Copying spends purity, not entropy
    χ(Π : F) = S(ρFfinal) − S(ρFinitial)

    For record-type couplings, what a witness learns equals its own entropy rise. Coming into existence as a fact turns local blank capacity into shared correlation, with zero fine-grained entropy produced.

    Steep, not fuzzy
    D = e−Λ, Λ = Σ ξj two witnesses need Λ ≥ 4 ln(1/δ)

    Overlaps multiply, so the crossing is exponentially fast: about 4×10−12 s for a sunlit dust grain, 9×10−22 s for a cat.

    Persistence is a separate clock
    B ≥ kT ln(T / ε τ0)

    A record’s energy barrier sets how long it lasts: about 37 kT holds it for a second, 78 kT for the age of the universe. Passive storage is free; life pays with flux instead.

    Facts end by migration
    record: readable by 2 of 10 pieces scrambled: needs 7 of 10

    Darwinism keeps correlation in small pieces; anti-Darwinism pushes the same correlation into large ones. The information survives; the fact does not. A horizon is the extreme case.

    Gravity runs the account
    Earth exports 6.1×1014 W/K ≈ 6.3×1037 bits/s

    Gravity lends the smooth, low-entropy start, keeps stars hot on a cold sky, partitions who can read what, caps the total and closes the books at horizons. Its only guaranteed facts are conserved charges.

    Not one threshold but several

    Kinds of existence

    KindThresholdEntropyGravity
    Ten criteria, tested against each other

    Do the criteria agree?

    Claimed linkStatusProof or counterexample
    What breaks unification

    From an electron to a black hole

    Across scales

    SystemThreshold valuesVerdict
    Where the thresholds disagree
      How crisp is the line

      Sharp, graded, relative

      Where it is sharp

      Where it is graded or relative

      What gravity does

      The ten lenses after red-teaming

      Each criterion, and what survived

      Next

      Open problems and tests

      Open problems
        Tests
          Sources

          References