Truth as Energetic Admissibility_ Invariants, Substrate, and the Elimination of Conflated "Truth" Concepts

Abstract Contemporary discourse uses “truth” interchangeably to mean correspondence, coherence, pragmatic success, or social consensus. These usages conflate incompatible criteria and render debates about truth non-computable. This paper introduces a non-social, substrate-grounded definition: truth as energetic admissibility. A system is said to be true, in this sense, if its invariant constraints remain stable under empirical refinement without increasing the minimal internal representation required to reason about it. Formally, truth holds when invariant content is preserved or strengthened while representational load does not grow under refinement. Grounded in energetic boundedness and incompleteness pressure, the paper proves that expansionary frameworks cannot converge in bounded systems and that elimination and invariant discovery are mandatory for truth. A set of operational diagnostics distinguishes admissible truth from proxy measures such as consensus, coherence, or practical success. The result is a precise, physically grounded truth criterion applicable across cognition, science, and artificial intelligence, independent of social validation or institutional scaffolding.