Spontaneous Emergence of Information Closure in a Minimally Constrained Nonequilibrium Physical System

The origin of persistent information is a fundamental unresolved problem bridging physics, chemistry, and biology. While biological systems clearly exploit information, it remains unclear whether information-bearing structures can arise prior to chemistry and replication. Here we present a computational investigation of a minimally constrained nonequilibrium physical system demonstrating the spontaneous emergence of information closure: a regime in which internal causal structures stabilize and persist under sustained energy flux and stochastic perturbation. The model imposes no biological assumptions, symbolic encodings, replication mechanisms, or predefined informational seeds. Across a large ensemble of simulations, the system consistently self-organizes into stable, low-variance network configurations characterized by persistent mutual information, resistance to noise, emergent compartmentalization, and topology locking. Quantitative metrics place the resulting structures in an intermediate regime between randomness and biological organization, indicating the formation of non-trivial, physically grounded informational order. These results demonstrate that information-bearing causal structure can arise generically in driven physical systems without invoking molecular specificity or selection. The findings support a layered view of emergence in which information precedes and enables chemistry, rather than originating from it, providing a conceptual bridge between nonequilibrium thermodynamics and the foundations of life.