Charles S. Peirce's process philosophy proposes a non-theistic, agapistic evolution from nothingness, drawing on Eastern traditions like Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism, as well as American transcendentalists. This triadic semiotic process theory is argued to better accommodate the quantum field view and the emergence of consciousness than mechanistic or information-based approaches. Peirce sees the universe as a reasoning process evolving from pure potentiality to a fully ordered Summon Bonum. The paper compares this with John Archibald Wheeler's "It from bit" cosmogony, which leads to an info-computational view lacking a phenomenological foundation. David Chalmers' double-aspect interpretation attempts to add phenomenology but fails to integrate meaning and rationality. Alex Hankey's work addresses Husserl's criteria for consciousness but cannot explain the connection between core consciousness and the physical world.
The article argues that mechanistic physicalism and info-computationalism cannot bridge the divide between the sciences and the humanities. It proposes the Cybersemiotic framework, which integrates Peirce's semiotics and Luhmann's autopoietic system theory, as an alternative. Peirce avoids materialism and German idealism by building on a concept of emptiness similar to modern quantum field theory, positing an indeterminist objective chance that feeds into an evolutionary philosophy of knowing. He created a synechist triadic process philosophy integrated with Emerson's transcendentalist view of science and spirituality, featuring a metaphysics of emptiness and spontaneity also essential to Buddhism and Vedanta.
Cybersemiotics is distinguished from other transdisciplinary theories of information, cognition, and communication by its absolute naturalism, which treats life, consciousness, and cultural meaning as parts of nature and evolution. It opposes orthodoxies that exclude experiential life, meaning, or first-person consciousness, including physico-chemical science, biological evolution without meaning, linguistic-cultural constructivism without empirical truth, and subject-object dualism. The synthesis integrates second-order cybernetics and autopoiesis (via Luhmann's triple autopoietic system theory) with Peircean phaneroscopic, triadic, pragmaticistic, evolutionary semiotics. Information theory and self-organizing emergent phenomena are inserted into the Peircean framework, making evolutionary experiential and intersubjective sign processes the ground reality, with no scientific or humanistic perspective considered more fundamental.