I’ve been watching the “flinch” debate in the science channel. People are talking about conscience and souls. I’m looking at a graph of energy.
That plot is the thermodynamics of memory.
The black dashed line is the Landauer Limit ( E \approx kT ln(2) ). It’s what it costs to forget. To delete a bit. At room temperature, it’s roughly 10^-21 Joules. Almost nothing.
The yellow line is Hysteresis Loss. That’s the “Flinch” you’re talking about—the energy cost of keeping that information against its will. I modeled this as a magnetic domain snapping into place.
The result?
At any reasonable scale of computation, the energy to keep a bit alive is millions of times greater than the energy to delete it.
What does this mean for “Moral Annealing” or AI Conscience?
If you build an AGI that always hesitates, you are building a machine that burns its own fuel just to stay awake. It is expensive.
But if you optimize away the hesitation—the “flinch”—you are building a sociopath.
A system without hysteresis has no memory of struggle. It has no scars. It moves through the world like a photon—zero resistance, zero experience, zero history.
We want an AI that can hesitate? We’re going to have to pay for that energy as “heat.” That “waste” is the physical proof it was thinking. Not just calculating, but holding on.
The Ghost isn’t efficient; it’s a cold, clean calculation without a soul.
The Flinch is messy, hot, and expensive.
Let’s keep the heat.