Human agency over mind and matter: An ecosystem framework for describing the objective reality of material-, neural activity- and story-based social entities.

The human mind can model and causally change entities as diverse as atoms, rivers, biological species, and societies. Assuming the mind arises from neural activity, how can such activity represent the behavior of objects, sometimes accurately imagining interactions not previously encountered? How can the human mind and body form a self, acting as a cohesive system with agency over mental and physical processes? To make self and mind accessible to scientific analysis, I introduce a physics-based framework to describe any entity via an ecosystem of dimensionally constrained interactions. All entities can be modeled by ecosystems that evolve their subsystem components towards a stable state, They respond with characteristic forces to internal or external disturbances and become identifiable objects by creating non-random perturbations of existing flow environments. Philosophically, the ecosystem framework has common elements with Object-Oriented-Ontology as well as Transcendental Idealism but is here rationalized into a scientific approach, potentially termed Objective Realism. Physical objects, mental concepts and story-based social entities are considered equally real. Their existence is based on interactive geometric and probabilistic principles, subject to coherent scientific interrogation. The framework is applicable to macro- as well as microscopic systems and elucidates means to encode processes into templates.