Creative Entropy Index (CEI)

The Creative Entropy Index (CEI) measures how much meaningful novelty a universe can still generate per epoch — its remaining capacity for genuine emergence rather than recombination.

High CEI indicates active emergence and unresolved futures. Low CEI indicates stabilisation, repetition, and mounting closure pressure.

CEI is coupled to Allocation Units of Cognition (AUC): sustained novelty contribution increases AUC generation capacity. As a universe approaches its entropy horizon, both CEI and new AUC issuance contract together.

Example: A civilization inventing genuinely new art forms, technologies, or social structures registers as high CEI activity. A civilization endlessly remaking the same handful of stories and tools in new packaging — however busy it looks — registers as declining CEI, because none of the output is structurally new. Mass-market virtual reality entertainment is the Concord's own ground-level case study: audiences and auditors alike came, independently, to read most of it as recombination in a convincing wrapper, and production followed audience away from it — the same low-CEI verdict "Paper Galaxies" received, just reached by popular taste rather than a formal Ledger review.