A Gateway to IPM - Dialogues and Context

This article offers an accessible introduction to 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. IPM 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 constitutive openness – a gap (Lack) that no system ever fully closes. The paper clarifies the multiple meanings of “information” in IPM by distinguishing four interconnected layers: physical‑informational, semantic‑functional, phenomenal, and computational. It also refines the concept of 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: 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 pertinentization and collective cognitive domains. Rather than collapsing these perspectives, the article maps convergences, tensions, and complementary explanatory roles. Explicit falsifiability conditions are listed, grounded in IPM’s simulation regularities (R1–R3) and its estimators Φ* and 𝒞. 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 articulates a non‑reductionist, process‑centered account of consciousness, agency, and individuation across biological, artificial, and collective systems. Companion documents: IPM Scientific Core (2026) and IPM Philosophical Core (2026). Simulation code and data available on Zenodo.