Records as Codes: Erasure-Correcting Redundancy, Broadcast Redundancy, and the Architecture of Recoverability

This paper is the seventh in a sequence developing an interpretive framework that redescribes physical reality as a causally consistent history of information updates rather than as a collection of objects independently existing within spacetime. Two prior results set up its question. The third paper (Uchida, 2026c) characterized public finality—recoverability of a committed fact by many mutually independent accessors, non-disturbingly and repeatably—as a broadcast redundancy: an effectively classical pointer value proliferated across many disjoint environmental fragments, approximately in the form of spectrum broadcast structure. The fourth paper (Uchida, 2026d) read the evaporating black hole as the regime in which a committed interior record crosses, at the Page time, from hidden to recoverable encoding, reconstructible from the radiation through entanglement-wedge reconstruction; and the parent framework (Uchida, 2026a, §10) had flagged holographic quantum error correction as a place its language of protected, redundantly encoded, locally recoverable records might find content. The present paper makes that content precise as a structure theory of recoverable records, kept separate from any claim of new physics or any suggestion that the framework derives the underlying results. The central claim is conditional and structural. The framework does not claim that every recoverable piece of information is a code, that the universe is literally a quantum error-correcting code, or that AdS/CFT describes our universe. It claims that when information qualifies as an erasure-recoverable record because an encoding preserves a logical degree of freedom—or a logical operator algebra—against a specified family of physical erasures, then that recoverability is formalized as an exact or approximate quantum error-correcting structure, in which each correctable erasure leaves an authorized complementary region supporting a recovery map. That formalization is itself an established mathematical classification; the paper's interpretive contribution is to read the series' recoverable record through it, and to set it against a second, distinct architecture. Broadcast redundancy makes the same effectively classical value legible from many disjoint fragments; erasure-correcting redundancy protects noncommuting logical quantum information by keeping each correctable erased region ignorant of—approximately private with respect to—the protected logical content, while suitable remaining regions recover it. The formal engine of this distinction is the duality between correctability and privacy (the information–disturbance tradeoff), not the no-cloning theorem; no-cloning, with the access structure of quantum secret sharing, survives as the reason independently usable recovery regions for arbitrary unknown logical quantum information must overlap. Three commitments keep the reading honest. First, it separates three senses of "record"—protected logical quantum information, a committed classical record, and a publicly final record—and insists that recovery or decoding restores access to logical quantum information but does not, by itself, commit a classical value; commitment additionally requires measurement, pointer imprinting, decoherence, and stabilization (Uchida, 2026f), and public finality a still later broadcast. Second, holographic quantum error correction is offered as the sharpest worked model of the distinction, with exactly solvable tensor-network toy codes (exact within the model) kept distinct from realistic semiclassical holographic reconstruction beyond those limits (generally treated as approximate), and both from the further question of state-dependence. Third, code-recoverability does not by itself imply public finality: protected quantum information can be recoverable from authorized regions while remaining non-public. The framework relabels code structure as the architecture of recoverability and derives none of it, making no independent empirical prediction. Its disciplined thesis is that codes protect recovery; broadcasts create publicity—different architectures that a single physical history may nonetheless realize in sequence.