Consistency Tax and Epistemic Thermodynamics: A Cross-Domain Framework for the Physical Cost of Incoherence

This repository contains the formal specification, simulations, and reproducibility resources for the Consistency Tax (CT) and Epistemic Thermodynamics framework. CT is defined as a Landauer-scaled Kullback–Leibler divergence between a real system's joint distribution over world (W), model (M), signals (S), and goals (G), and a coherent reference distribution under the same constraints. It provides a general metric for the physical cost of incoherence in systems spanning artificial intelligence, human behavior, biology, and organizations. Included are:- Main theoretical paper (LaTeX),- Supplementary derivations and simulations (toy POMDP, CTI),- Experimental protocols,- Reproducibility checklist,- TikZ figure templates,- License and citation files. All claims are structured with falsifiability, and the framework includes explicit empirical benchmarks across domains.