Pointer Architecture: An Operational Discrete Substrate from First Difference to Holographic Dark Energy
Mikhail Savchenko
We define Pointer Architecture (PA), a formal computational substrate S = (G, R, C, A, π), and give it an operational realisation as a small Forth-like language, Sixth, in 38 primitives. The substrate passes 40 emergence demonstrations (646 assertions, no failures) that climb from a single distinction through arithmetic, time, space, observers and universal computation to autopoiesis, a cosmogenesis bootstrap and the substrate's own measurement of a consciousness quantity Φ_PA. On this substrate we prove four complexity results within explicit scope (graph-isomorphism-hardness of pointer equivalence, #P-hardness of weighted path observables, a per-step commit-cost bound for M observers, Shannon-rate archive compression) and three correspondences with CRDTs, Petri nets and the actor model. A substrate-cone construction realises the holographic entropy cone and maps PA's primitives onto the algebraic-observer programme in quantum gravity; on the de Sitter horizon it reproduces standard holographic dark energy, ρ_Λ = 3H₀²c²/(16πG), within a factor of about 0.73 of the observed value. An empirical scope-control on Pythia language-model activations falsifies the naive hypothesis that hidden-activation covariance is a holographic entropy function. The paper is a structural-correspondence contribution with pre-stated falsifiers, not a solved theory of consciousness.
