BLACK HOLES AS ONTOLOGICAL DEFRAGMENTERS Resolving the Black-Hole Information Paradox via Horizon Erasure (Physical Buffer / Null-Pointer Framework — Model BH v1.0)

The black-hole information paradox arises from a tension between (i) unitary time evolution in quantum mechanics and (ii) the thermal character of Hawking radiation in semiclassical gravity. This paper proposes a resolution by adopting a finite-capacity computational ontology: the universe possesses a finite information-storage/processing budget (“Physical Buffer”) constrained by holographic bounds, and therefore cannot preserve arbitrarily detailed records of all past states indefinitely. Within this framework, controlled information erasure is not pathological but structurally necessary for continued state updates (the “Null Pointer” paradigm). We argue that black holes act as ontological defragmenters: localized, high-density erasure zones that prevent buffer saturation by converting “used” information into thermodynamic exhaust. We show that (i) Landauer’s per-bit erasure cost at the Hawking temperature reproduces the correct black-hole thermodynamic scaling; (ii) Hawking radiation may be interpreted as the heat released by erasing horizon-encoded degrees of freedom; (iii) the information paradox dissolves because information loss is a physical feature rather than a contradiction; and (iv) the same accounting, when applied at the cosmological horizon using the Gibbons–Hawking temperature, naturally yields an energy-density scale comparable to the observed dark-energy density, resolving an “informational vacuum catastrophe” that appears if one naively uses the CMB temperature. We provide a strict separation between phenomenological postulates and derivations, list decisive referee objections with preemptive responses, and outline falsifiable observational pathways, especially via cosmological signatures and near-horizon gravitational-wave phenomenology.