From Extensional Cost to Coherence Cost: Law-Compressed Coherence and Recursive Differentiation as a Reply to the Energy Objection

Simulation hypotheses are often challenged by an energy objection: a universe as large, structured, and observationally coherent as ours would require impossible or effectively unbounded energy and computation to simulate. This objection usually assumes two strong architectural premises. First, it assumes that simulated reality must be instantiated as an externally expanding, full-resolution map whose cost scales with apparent internal size. Second, it assumes that global coherence must be maintained through brute-force storage of an ever-growing table of facts across observers, measurements, histories, and correlations. This paper argues that both assumptions are stronger than necessary. Apparent scale may arise through recursive internal differentiation of a fixed totality rather than external expansion, and coherence itself may be generated from compact lawful structure rather than stored extensionally as a total fact-table. On this view, the relevant question is not simply whether apparent size can be compressed, but whether coherence can be law-compressed. The paper does not defend the truth of the simulation hypothesis. It advances a narrower claim: the standard energy objection is weaker than it appears if both scale and coherence can, in principle, be generated from compact structure rather than requiring proportional external substrate.