Contemporary Monisms in Dialogue Expanding Informational-Processual Monism

This article develops Informational-Processual Monism (IPM) through a critical dialogue with five contemporary post-reductionist thinkers: Michael Levin, Sara Imari Walker, Igor Ševo, Vikas O'Reilly-Shah, and Francesco Fronterotta. The framework proposes that reality is fundamentally composed of dynamic informational processes operating in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, with consciousness emerging as recursively self-sustaining coherence under conditions of constitutive openness. The paper clarifies the multiple meanings of “information” employed in IPM by distinguishing four interconnected layers: physical-informational, semantic-functional, phenomenal, and computational. It further refines the concept of the “Lack” as the gap between operational closure and absolute self-sufficiency, linking autopoiesis, metastability, and ontological incompleteness within a unified processual ontology. Each dialogue partner contributes a distinct dimension to the framework: Levin’s scale-free cognition and bioelectricity, Walker’s historical causality and Assembly Theory, Ševo’s phenomenal informational monism, O'Reilly-Shah’s state-space formalism, and Fronterotta’s concept of pertinentization and collective cognitive domains. Rather than collapsing these perspectives into a single doctrine, the article maps their convergences, tensions, and complementary explanatory roles. The text also introduces explicit falsifiability conditions for IPM, including predictions relating thermodynamic disequilibrium, recursive informational integration, resilience, assembly complexity, and Local Cognitive Resonance (LCR). The framework is presented as provisional, revisable, and open to empirical and conceptual criticism. Situated at the intersection of philosophy of mind, process ontology, systems theory, thermodynamics, cognitive science, complexity studies, and human-AI convergence, this work proposes a structured attempt to articulate a non-reductionist, process-centered account of consciousness, agency, and individuation across biological, artificial, and collective systems.