Records Say What Can Be Known: Empirical access, response functionals, and severity in finite information physics

Abstract

The epistemology companion to the measurement-discipline papers: what a finite information model is allowed to claim about knowledge. Such models naturally invite a confusion — they specify a substrate ledger (admissible records, repair operations, forbidden states, internal counts), but experiments never read an arbitrary internal ledger entry; they read calibrated response channels: currents, residues, poles, susceptibilities, cross-sections, spectra, fluxes, and likelihoods. The resulting principle — records say what can be known; responses say what can be measured — is deliberately not a new interpretation of quantum mechanics competing on the same axis as QBism, relational quantum mechanics, or Everett: it is a constraint on empirical access in any finite, record-bearing substrate theory. A record is a stable, copyable, dynamically protected fact; a response is the closed-time-path or equivalent operational map by which an instrument couples to such facts; and internal ledger structure may be real in a model while remaining unknowable in principle unless it is written into stable records and exposed by a response. The paper formalises the distinction with a record algebra, a response functional, and an empirical-access equivalence relation; compares the view with QBism, relational quantum mechanics, Everett, hidden-variable realism, quantum Darwinism, and engineering calibration practice; and proposes a Mayo-style severity criterion for finite information physics — a numerical claim is credible only when the record object, response map, calibration constants, inherited readouts, and possible falsifiers are stated before the test. Recent applications in the programme serve as case studies: the QED α(0) boundary and Thomson readout, black-hole flux, CMB/halo likelihoods, and electroweak pole matching. The intended contribution is methodological: the record–response split does not prove a substrate true, but it sharply limits how such a substrate may make empirical claims.

Keywords

How to cite

Elliman, D. (2026). Records Say What Can Be Known: Empirical access, response functionals, and severity in finite information physics. Neuro-Symbolic Ltd technical report. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21219214

@techreport{elliman2026recordepistemology,
  author      = {Elliman, David},
  title       = {Records Say What Can Be Known: Empirical access, response functionals, and severity in finite information physics},
  institution = {Neuro-Symbolic Ltd},
  year        = {2026},
  doi         = {10.5281/zenodo.21219214},
  url         = {https://neusym.ai/papers/record_epistemology}
}