Process, Constraint, and Consciousness in a Self-Organising Cosmos
Toward a Natural-Philosophical Research Programme
Keywords:
process philosophy, Whitehead, self-organisation, constraint-closure, consciousness, research programme, living universeAbstract
Modern science often treats matter, life, and consciousness as separate domains. Taking Whitehead's process philosophy as its central framework, and drawing on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, complexity science, and consciousness studies, this paper develops CAT (Cosmic Architecture Theory) as a natural-philosophical research programme. Its central schema describes the relation between multi-scale constraint architecture (A) and embedded local modes (mu), together with a cross-scale embedding relation through which local modes at one scale participate in the constraint environment of the next. CAT proposes that matter, life, and consciousness can be understood as phases of a single processual continuum, and it formulates the bridge from complex organisation to experience as an explicit speculative principle rather than leaving it implicit. It also reinterprets Godelian undecidability and computational irreducibility, not as deductions, but as considerations within an inference to the best explanation bearing on ontological openness. CAT is presented as a Lakatosian research programme with specified empirical contact surfaces and explicit degeneracy conditions.
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