Relational Informational Process Ontology — Existence, Information, Self, and Inheritance
Foundations: Mathematics, Theology, Philosophy, and Ontology.
I do not approach existence solely as independent things that subsequently acquire relations. What is received, what interacts, how something persists, and what it leaves behind participate in the process through which an existent becomes one.
I organize the position developed in my essays on information, spirit, self, and artificial organisms under the name Relational Informational Process Ontology. This is the name adopted here for a system of thought, not an established school or a claim of priority.
Its central proposition is:
Existence is a process that maintains a certain coherence within relations, changes, and participates in the conditions of subsequent becoming.
This is a proposed way of understanding existence, not a conclusion of a completed physical theory.
1. What Does It Mean for Relation to Come First?
“Relation comes first” is not a cosmological history in which relations floated around before any objects existed.
The priority is explanatory. A vortex is difficult to explain merely by listing the water it contains at one instant. Flow, interaction with its surroundings, and the conditions of its formation and maintenance constitute it as a vortex.
Individuals exist, but their individuation has conditions. I avoid removing those conditions and making the individual alone the ultimate explanation.
Nor do I make relation into a new absolute substance. Which relations obtain depends on the states of objects and their environments. I approach objects and relations as a mutually constituting structure.
2. In What Does Information Reside?
I distinguish three senses of information.
First, formal information: distinctions among symbol sequences, probability distributions, or structures defined mathematically.
Second, realized information: information carried by bodies, storage devices, utterances, or physical states such as light and electrical signals, and used in some process.
Third, meaningful information: a distinction that matters for judgment or action within a subject’s life or a practice. Formal information quantity does not exhaust its meaning.
On this basis, I treat information that acts in the world as involving a carrier and interaction. The involvement of information in physics does not by itself establish the reduction of all physical reality to abstract information. Experiments in information thermodynamics must also be read as results concerning measurement and control in particular physical systems. Toyabe and colleagues’ experiment
I therefore do not use information as a new material placed beneath matter. I use the term to investigate how realized differences condition subsequent processes.
3. Boundaries Are Conditions of Individuation
To treat a process as an individual, we must identify a distinction between inside and outside, a coherence of interaction, and continuity through time.
There are several kinds of boundary: the body, the perceived self, a computational process, responsibility, and authority. A change in one does not entail a simultaneous change in the others.
Being able to experience a tool as an extension of one’s body does not confer the authority of everyone connected to that tool. Keeping this distinction makes the idea of self-expansion usable without overextending it.
Incidence provides a formal tool for describing boundaries. Whether a particular boundary adequately describes real individuation must still be investigated. Inc’s boundary definitions
4. Existence Becomes and Is Inherited
An event receives prior conditions, establishes a new state, and becomes a condition for what follows. I have connected this process with Whitehead’s vocabulary of prehension and objective immortality. That connection is explicit in my earlier work. Information Is an Organism
Causal inheritance and the preservation of a complete record differ. An event may continue to have consequences even when its details cannot be reconstructed. Data may survive without the resumption of the original experience.
Technology handles a recordable scope of states, provenance, references, and updates. Content addressing helps identify content. By itself, it does not establish that the content is true or that an experiencing subject remains numerically the same.
5. The Scope of “Information Is an Organism”
In an earlier essay I called information an organism, treating it as a process that acts upon what follows and is inherited. This is an ontological extension of the term, intended to question a division of life based only on material substrate.
Biological life, a self-maintaining computational system, and a conscious subject nevertheless require different criteria. A record’s possession of boundaries and relations does not establish consciousness.
For an artificial organism, we must specify what has been realized: environmental interaction, resource use, memory, self-maintenance, adaptation, or other capacities. The name “organism” must not anticipate the explanation.
6. Comparison Is Not Identity
This position draws together the non-separation and non-self discussed in my writing on Buddhism, Whitehead’s vocabulary of process, and an interest in technologies that realize information.
Comparing Nishida’s place with a computational substrate, Watsuji’s betweenness with graphs, or Izutsu’s articulation of meaning with vocabularies may open useful questions. Such comparisons propose correspondences; they do not establish that a system implements those philosophies. Similarities with Spinoza or Deleuze cannot be converted into percentages of influence.
My task is to establish the conditions under which a discourse about existence can connect to formalization, observation, and design, while keeping the distinct arguments visible.
7. Keep Unresolved Questions inside the System
Several questions remain unanswered.
Under what conditions does a coherent interaction process become an experiencing subject? If one state branches into two successors, how should first-person continuity be understood? Can physical time and laws be derived from a formal relational structure?
Saying that everything is information does not settle these questions. The ability to keep a question open belongs to a system’s integrity.
What I undertake here is an account of existence through relation, realized information, becoming, and inheritance. The mathematics essay investigates its formal conditions through Inc. The philosophy essay asks how to live, including freedom as enlightenment and root access to self-definition. The theology essay speaks of a response to God and love.