Informational-Processual Monism – Scientific Core and Speculative Interpretation

This document presents the scientific core of IPM: a testable research program on dynamic predictive integration in dissipative systems. Philosophical extensions (consciousness, hard problem, personal identity) are developed separately in a companion document. IPM did not begin as a purely empirical program. It originated from a philosophical intuition: that reality can be understood as informational processes in continuous transformation, driven by constitutive incompleteness (Lack), and that the organizational principles associated with consciousness may form a continuous gradient rather than a binary property. This intuition guided the development of computational experiments and metrics: the Lack Kernel, the Spectral Experiment, the IPM Protocol, and the Collective Regimes Detector. The results of these experiments, in turn, provided empirical traction that led to refinements of the philosophical framework. The relationship between the scientific core and the philosophical interpretation is therefore one of mutual constraint and iterative refinement: philosophical intuitions guided the experiments, and experimental results constrained and refined the philosophy. Neither level is reducible to the other, but neither is independent of the other.