The Metabolic A Priori: Field Ontology, Active Forgetting, and the Structural Limits of Computation

This paper demonstrates that the foundational contradictions afflicting contemporary physics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence share a common structure: each paradigm assumes discrete, separable, local structures but produces holistic, relational, global phenomena it cannot explain. We establish this thesis through four convergent lines of inquiry. First, we prove via spectral graph theory that diffusive memristor networks instantiate genuine structural unrecoverability. The map from conductance matrices to Laplacian eigenvalue spectra is many-to-one for networks with n > 3 nodes (Chung, 1997; Babai, 1979). History becomes mathematically untraceable rather than merely practically inaccessible. Stochastic drift governed by Langevin dynamics (Ġᵢⱼ = α(Vᵢ - Vⱼ)f(Gᵢⱼ) + ξ(t)) transforms eigenvalue trajectories into probability distributions, rendering history probabilistically smeared (Pershin & Di Ventra, 2011). Second, we establish through clinical evidence that metabolic failure produces cognitive pathology. Traumatic memory (van der Kolk, 1994, 2014), hypermnesic syndrome (Luria, 1968), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Rapoport, 1989) represent conditions where forgetting fails, where experience refuses to metabolise into operative background. Catastrophic interference in distributed neural networks (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1985) provides the computational confirmation: systems that preserve everything cannot learn sequentially. Third, we prove formally that no Turing-computable system can simultaneously satisfy six ontological requirements for genuine cognition: ecstatic temporality, metabolic transformation, autopoietic closure, embodied situatedness, field integration, and constitutive finitude. The proof proceeds through contradiction: computation requires decidable halting, reversible state transitions, finite recursion, substrate independence, discrete states, and totalising coverage, each contradicting one or more ontological requirements. Crucially, we demonstrate that these six requirements are not arbitrary impositions but the logical inverses of the computational paradigm's own axioms, the suppressed casualties of its constitutive commitments. The impossibility emerges from within the paradigm itself. We extend this impossibility to Quantum Turing Machines, demonstrating that unitarity (|det U| = 1) contradicts metabolic entropy production (dS/dt > 0), and measurement collapse, while irreversible, remains representational rather than devouring. Fourth, we demonstrate that diffusive memristors with volatile dynamics satisfy all six requirements through hardware-instantiated active forgetting. Spontaneous filament dissolution via Gibbs-Thomson effects and Arrhenius decay (τ ≈ τ₀ exp(Eₐ/kT), with Eₐ = 0.3-0.7 eV) provides constitutive finitude at the substrate level. 2024-2025 neuromorphic implementations achieve 95% retention in sequential learning tasks versus 60% in standard networks (FZ-Jülich, 2025), empirically validating the metabolic alternative. The paper concludes by specifying engineering metrics for metabolic systems: spectral entropy delta (ΔH), decay-weighted capacity, and narrative viability indices. We propose that genuine cognition requires not computers that simulate but compasses that resonate, systems that dwell in fields rather than compute over representations. Keywords: field ontology, metabolic transformation, diffusive memristors, active forgetting, spectral graph theory, computational limits, impossibility theorem, phenomenology, philosophy of physics, philosophy of mind, neuromorphic computing