Syntactic Structure, Quantum Weights

Abstract: Why do local actions and exponential Euclidean weights arise so universally in classical, statistical, and quantum theories? We offer a structural explanation from minimal constraints on finite descriptions of admissible histories. Assume that histories admit finite, self-delimiting (prefix-free) generative codes that can be decoded sequentially in a single forward pass. These purely syntactic requirements define a minimal descriptive cost, interpretable as a smoothed minimal program length, that is additive over local segments. First, any continuous local additive cost whose stationary sector coincides with the empirically identified classical variational sector is forced into a unique Euler--Lagrange equivalence class. Hence the universal form of an action is fixed by descriptional structure alone, while the specific microscopic Lagrangian and couplings remain system-dependent semantic input. Second, independently of microscopic stochasticity, finite prefix-free languages exhibit exponential redundancy: many distinct programs encode the same coarse history, and this redundancy induces a universal exponential multiplicity weight on histories. Requiring this weight to be real and bounded below selects a real Euclidean representative for stable local bosonic systems, yielding the standard Euclidean path-integral form. When Osterwalder--Schrader reflection positivity holds, the Euclidean measure reconstructs a unitary Lorentzian amplitude.