The Information Coherence Hypothesis: A Unified Informational Framework for Reality, Consciousness, and Meaning

Abstract

The Information Coherence Hypothesis (ICH) is a comprehensive ontological framework proposing that information — understood not as Shannon-theoretic data, but as a fundamental substrate of distinctions and relations — constitutes the primary fabric of reality. The paper presents a multi-level architecture of nested informational spaces connected through informational resonance, governed by twenty foundational principles. It introduces the Information Spectrum — a five-tier ontology from structural to transcendent information — and characterizes consciousness as a local metapattern of maximal integrated information. Key contributions include: Informational attractors as teleological organizing principles Temporal integration as an emergent property of informational dynamics Central Information Metapattern (CIM) — the formal limiting case of maximal informational integration, grounded in a triadic ontology: Informational Protovacuum, Logos, and CIM Integration Minimum Principle (solve et coagula): all phase transitions to higher integration necessarily pass through a minimum — demonstrated across cosmic, biological, psychological, and technological domains Formal analysis of beauty, creativity, play, humor, ethics, dreams, embodiment, death, and meaning as expressions of informational organization The framework demonstrates structural convergence with seven independent lines of contemporary research (2025–2026), including Levin's multiscale competency architecture, topological constraints on self-organization, cognition space cartography, and molecular topology of reasoning in large language models — suggesting the ICH captures genuine structural invariants of reality. 18 testable predictions are proposed across AI topology, neural integration, sleep architecture, humor phenomenology, and contemplative neuroscience. Connections are developed to Integrated Information Theory (IIT), the Free Energy Principle (FEP), and Constructor Theory. The ICH offers an integrative bridge between physics, biology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the perennial questions of meaning. Keywords: information ontology, integrated information, informational resonance, self-organization, consciousness, metapattern, emergent complexity, phase transitions, embodied cognition, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics