The Autocremation Paradox: Material Necessity in Closed Causal Loops

The Autocremation Paradox (ACP) is a thought experiment designed to close the redundancy problem of the bootstrap paradox. Where standard loops persist an unchanged object or a piece of information without origin, the ACP lets the thermodynamic remainder of an event—the ashes of a cremation—function as the material cause (propellant) of that same event. The resulting State-Change Identity makes the loop ontologically mandatory: if the ashes exist, the event that produces them cannot fail without generating a material contradiction. Time-travel apparatus is thereby rendered redundant; matter itself folds the timeline. The construction supplies a physical mechanism for Novikov consistency and a test case for the Principle of Sufficient Reason, while collapsing libertarian agency inside the loop.