Information Additional Theories

Informational Realism

Philosopher/theologian/mathematician William Dembski argues that “informational realism,” understood properly, can “dissolve the mind-body problem.” Information realism “asserts that the ability to exchange information is the defining feature of reality, of what it means, at the most fundamental level, for any entity to be real.” It does not deny, he says, the existence of things (i.e., entities or substances). Rather, it defines things as “their capacity for communicating or exchanging information with other things,” such that “things make their reality felt by communicating or exchanging information.” This means that information is “the relational glue that holds reality together” and “thus assumes primacy in informational realism” (Dembski, 2021, 2023).

A key move in dissolving the mind-body problem, according to Dembski, is to substitute information for perception under an informational realism framework, thereby giving the mind direct access to fundamental properties (9.8.10). Moreover, he says, informational realism is “able to preserve a common-sense realism that idealism has always struggled to preserve” because all things simply communicate information to their “immediate surroundings, which then ramifies through the whole of reality, reality being an informationally connected whole” (Dembski, 2021, 2023).

Infoautopoiesis

Engineering professor Jaime Cardenas-Garcia links consciousness with “infoautopoiesis” (i.e., the process of self-production of information) and seeks to “demystify” both. Infoautopoiesis, he says, “allows a human organism-in-its-environment to uncover the bountifulness of matter and/or energy as expressions of their environmental spatial/temporal motion/change, i.e., as information or Batesonian differences which make a difference.” Thus, “individuated, internal, inaccessible, semantic information is the essence of consciousness,” and neither self-produced information nor consciousness is “a fundamental quantity of the Universe” (Cardenas-Garcia, 2023).

Bettinger's Operational Metaphysics

Philosopher of science and religion Jesse Bettinger's Operational Metaphysics (OM) holds that each individual stream of subjective experience is conferred by a fundamental, information driven ontological process (of what he calls "information in-formation") that can be articulated vis a modified version of Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR; Hameroff & Penrose, 1996) in tandem with the reconstructed elements of A.N. Whitehead’s actual entities and occasions of experience (Whitehead, 1929), as a set of relational entities of information across successive phases that selectively orchestrate into ensembles of collective values that give rise to the basic constituents of subjective experience, while remaining consistent with a paired physical description of nature, which also promotes a view in the range of Peirce's "objective idealism" (Peirce, 1891).

Bettinger interpolates objective reduction into the ontological sequence, reworking four features of the quantum measurement problem (superposition, reduction, the Schrödinger wave function, and the objective threshold) so that each "sampling" event marks the initial phase in the becoming of experience, while simultaneously addressing what Penrose regards as the incompleteness of quantum mechanics.

This view holds a process-based transcendental realism (Bhaskar, 1975; Ferraris, 2015) - where metaphysics and ontology share a uniform construct - and a structural realism, in which the cardinal formulae of mathematical physics signal this underlying construct (Worrall, 1989). Bettinger conceptually houses this framework within the conjoint categories of Peirce's cosmogonic philosophy (Peirce, 1891) in conjunction with the three categories of Aristotle's “first philosophy” involving the inquiry into “being-qua-being,” as a search for the first principles underwriting experience (Aristotle, Metaphysics IV.1), with psychical-religious overtones identified in terms of Plotinus's spiritual cosmology (Plotinus, Enneads) alongside the correlated foundations of Indian and monotheistic metaphysics.

[Note that Bettinger's Operational Metaphysics could also be classified under Idealism]

References

Aristotle. Metaphysics, Book IV.1.

Bhaskar, R. (1975). A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds Books.

Ferraris, M. (2015). Introduction to New Realism. Bloomsbury.

Hameroff, S., & Penrose, R. (1996). Conscious events as orchestrated space-time selections. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 3(1), 36–53.

Kastrup, B. (2019). The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. iff Books.

Peirce, C. S. (1891). The architecture of theories. The Monist, 1(2), 161–176.

Plotinus. Enneads.

Tegmark, M. (2014). Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality. Knopf.

Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Macmillan.

Worrall, J. (1989). Structural realism: The best of both worlds? Dialectica, 43(1–2), 99–124.

Zhang’s Selective Reality Theory

Internet manager/independent researcher Yuxin Zhang’s Selective Reality Theory (SRT) holds that consciousness is a late-forming structure within a longer chain of selection, a late “condensation of reality.” (Consciousness is not the source of reality.) In its human form, consciousness has two distinguishable layers: feeling and the reflexive awareness that one is feeling and choosing. Beneath both lies selection itself—the exclusion, shaping, and inscription by which a field of possibility is narrowed into determinate form. Selection is not already consciousness; it is the generative ground from which consciousness can later condense. As Zhang puts it, "the last layer to form is the one most easily mistaken for the earliest source" (Zhang, 2026).

SRT reverses the usual order of explanation. Rather than asking how unconscious matter produces consciousness in a single emergent leap, it asks under what conditions selection structures progressively become capable of experience—a generative pathway, not an emergent jump. The framework distinguishes three layers within a single selection chain. The first is selection without feeling: immune recognition, crystallization, and erosion all narrow possibilities and leave traces, but do not feel what they are doing. The second is sentience, which appears only when selection enters an embodied bearing-position—a position to which consequences return, leave traces, and become organized around what matters for its continued viability. On this reading, feeling is not added from outside to a mechanical process; it is the inner face of consequences being borne. Pain, for example, is "what it is like, from inside, to bear the fact that this consequence is bad for me." The third layer is reflexive awareness—knowing that one is feeling, choosing, and persisting across time—which condenses later still, when self-inscription enters a workable middle range: stable enough for a position to recognize itself as the same, yet not so rigid that revision becomes impossible.

Everyday intuition mistakes this last and thinnest layer for the source; SRT instead locates the source lower down, in the selection history that makes reflexive awareness possible. SRT therefore does not offer a direct solution to the Hard Problem within the traditional frame; it reframes the starting point. The question is not how subjectivity suddenly appears from non-subjectivity, but how selection, embodiment, consequence-return, and self-inscription form a structure for which things matter from within. A late-forming structure can still be real and load-bearing: consciousness does not initiate selection from outside the world, but once present, it reshapes the terrain in which future selections occur. Zhang says his book offers this placement as a candidate model with stated failure conditions, not as a final answer (Zhang, 2026).

Zhang assesses implications of SRT. Free Will: Freedom is not the absence of structure, but the partial opening of structure under conditions where a conscious bearing-position can re-enter its own selection history. Life After Death: The subject is not an original inner substance but the sediment of an embodied selection history; consciousness condenses upon that history. Death is therefore not the disappearance of a self that was ever the metaphysical source, but the dissolution of the embodied parameters that held that history together. AI Consciousness. The decisive question is not how much information a system integrates or makes globally available, but whether there is an embodied bearing-position to which the consequences of its selections return from the inside. A system may process, represent, and report without occupying such a position; integration and access are not yet sentience.

Earthstar One’s “Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass”

Independent communicator Earthstar One offers a “Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass” (OKIC) theory of consciousness in which consciousness reflects the two-way, self-system interplay experienced when one orients to informative content perceptively, including knowledgeably, yet also navigates through active wonder about its dynamic, noise-ignorant, ambiguous-yet-identifiable parts. The resulting richness ranges from continuous to discrete, with validation (including time) and ambiguity modulating. Done well, richness exploration grants shareable insights through synchrony and resonances from the mundane rendezvous to impressive predictions to the paranormal.

Reality is both representational and a cipher.[1] Mirroring actual, shared enmeshments, balance disrupted paradoxically by otherness is the cipher of awareness. Phenomena ranging from discrete to continuous, yet centered relationally, are the cipher of reality modeling.[2] When either kaleidoscope (outer) and compass (inner) or discrete and continuous phenomena do not enmesh, distortions arise and may persist. Communication channel distortions lead to situationally-reinforcing binds of awareness and modeling, which shared reality mirrors in hidden or deceptive enmeshments.

Consciousness that increases resonant phenomena requires the ability to decipher, or at least recomprehend, so as to resolve vulnerabilities, activate wider representational capacity, and reveal real possibilities through generative means. Communication serves as the intermediary. Reality is not only understandable in immediate context but decipherable with regard to wider aspects of shared reality by virtue of anchors that range from subjective to objective and true-sense to meta.[3, 4]

The continuous channel forms and reforms existing patterns. Its functional parameters make possible the comprehension as well as generalizable parameterization of any phenomena, making for verifiable and interoperable frameworks.[5] The shared morphic base state is grounded in force-independent causative physical phenomena. In short, modulation of novelty and redundancy through three flux-level tension pairs: momentum-position, dispersing-gathering, and transient-persistent.[6, 7]

Consciousness is thus a mirror, both distortable and generative, that sees to its own repair when deciphering reality from OKIC, with the fear-prone logical consistency of a science and awe-inspired richness of diverse visages.

References

[1] One, E. The Science of Representational Reality: Outer Kaleidoscope, Inner Compass (digital content library, 2025).

[2] One, E. “Nesting and Channeling of Semantic-Syntactic Information: Attributing Richness of Existence to the Resolution of Conditioning to Source ‘Noise’, Identification & Disorientation” (figure set, 2025).

[3] One, E. “Natural language & repair | Role of anchors” (figure set, 2025).

[4] One, E. “Might true-sense anchors repair the representational capacity of natural language? A multidisciplinary puzzle” (article, 2024).

[5] One, E. “Meta-framework for mapping to OKIC” (figure, 2021, rev 2024).

[6] One, E. “Notes from the existential underground: the universe as a complex emergent system,” Cosmos & History, Oct 2016.

[7] One, E. “Implications of a novel view of the cosmological energy density and pressure relationship” (article, 2003).