Information-Volume Collapse and the Inference Manifold of Physical Reality

Arc III — Matter Paper 4 Title Information-Volume Collapse and the Inference Manifold of Physical Reality Zenodo DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18225861 Description (Zenodo Abstract / Description Field) This paper introduces the concept of information-volume collapse as a unifying operational mechanism underlying mass emergence, cloaking, and apparent loss of degrees of freedom in composite physical systems. Rather than treating physical reality as a fixed state space populated by microstates, the work models it as an inference manifold whose effective dimensionality depends on accessibility constraints. Information-volume collapse occurs when internal correlations within a system consume inference capacity, rendering large regions of the system’s state space operationally inaccessible to external probes. The resulting reduction in accessible volume manifests as effective mass, inertial resistance, and apparent localization, without requiring additional ontological assumptions. The paper formalizes this collapse geometrically on the inference manifold, showing how accessibility-induced contractions generate stable, lower-dimensional effective descriptions. This perspective unifies earlier results on operational mass renormalization and protocol dependence, and provides a natural bridge to cloaking phenomena and dark-sector behavior. By reframing “hidden” structure as inaccessible rather than nonexistent, the work dissolves sharp distinctions between visible and dark degrees of freedom, and prepares the ground for the explicit treatment of operational cloaking developed in the subsequent paper. Keywords Information volume; inference manifold; accessibility collapse; emergent mass; cloaked degrees of freedom; dark sector; operational geometry; foundations of physics Notes (Optional / Internal) Arc III — Matter Introduces geometric language for accessibility collapse Leads to: Operational Cloaking and Protocol Dependence of Dark-Sector Observables