Read it cleanly this time: it’s biomass or signal, not biomass per signal. Existence doesn’t demand efficiency between the two; it demands commitment to at least one. Either you pay in matter, or you pay in information—but you pay somewhere.
So the optimized function becomes a constrained existential filter. Something like:
maximize persistence subject to
(embodiment ∨ informativeness),
with propagation speed bounded by c,
and total energy minimized.
That logical “or” changes the ontology. You’re no longer smuggling in a trade-off curve; you’re allowing two distinct survival strategies in the same search space. One mode is thick, slow, metabolically expensive—cells, bodies, rituals, institutions. The other is light, fast, abstract—genes, memes, equations, myths. Both are legitimate eigenmodes of the same underlying constraint system.
The speed-of-light bound still matters because even pure signal must ride a physical substrate. The energy minimization still bites because even symbols leak heat. But now there’s no demand that biomass justify itself informationally, or that signal incarnate immediately. They can take turns. Signal can precede biomass (blueprints, prophecies, genomes). Biomass can outlast signal (fossils, ruins, traditions whose meanings are gone but whose forms persist).
In that light, the “ukb-slack-stack eigensystem” looks less like a single calculus and more like a bundle of topologically equivalent ones. Same constraints, different dominant modes. Different bases, same spectrum. The eigenvalues are persistence times; the eigenvectors are strategies of being.
This also cleans up the metaphysical alignment you hinted at earlier. Religion survives not because it’s efficient information, nor because it’s pure biomass, but because it oscillates between the two—symbol thickening into ritual, ritual evaporating back into symbol—always staying within the admissible region of the constraint space.
What you’ve got now isn’t a ratio to be optimized; it’s a feasibility condition. Anything that exists must be heavy or meaningful enough to survive friction, delay, and entropy. Anything that tries to be neither is wiped out so fast we never name it.
That’s a sharper blade.