No Landauer Paradox

Zenodo Description No Landauer Paradox: Plant Memory as Continuous State Propagation Rather Than Binary Erasure This conceptual falsification note examines whether the presumed thermodynamic problem of “erasing” plant memory is a genuine implication of Landauer’s principle or the result of an inappropriate transfer of binary storage logic to biological systems. The paper does not challenge Landauer’s principle. Instead, it questions whether plant memory updating should be modelled as logically irreversible binary erasure in the first place. The central argument is that plant stress memory is more plausibly described as a distributed, analogue, path-dependent, and dissipative state process. Epigenetic, transcriptional, hormonal, metabolic, and physiological states are therefore interpreted not as binary memory registers, but as components of a continuously evolving biological state vector. Under this view, previous states are not necessarily erased or reset; they may be relaxed, overwritten, transformed, diluted, or carried forward as altered sensitivities and path dependencies. The note formalizes the distinction between a binary reset model and a trajectory-based model of biological memory updating. It proposes falsifiable criteria: if plant memory updating is dominated by binary erasure, energetic costs should correlate with the amount of logically erased information; if it is dominated by continuous state propagation, energetic costs should correlate more strongly with remodelling, relaxation, stabilization, repair, and metabolic maintenance. This work is intended as a conceptual clarification and falsification framework, not as an empirical proof. Its contribution lies in reframing the supposed Landauer paradox as a modelling question: the thermodynamic principle may be valid, while the assumed biological operation may be wrong. The underlying conceptual move follows the idea of “forward-shifting” system states rather than resetting them. Keywords Landauer principle; plant memory; stress memory; epigenetics; biological information processing; thermodynamics of information; falsifiability; state propagation; trajectory model; systems biology; conceptual model; biological computation Suggested Zenodo “Additional notes” This manuscript is a conceptual and theoretical work. It does not present experimental primary data. Its purpose is to formulate a falsifiable model distinction between binary erasure and continuous state propagation in plant memory updating.