Post-Merger Duality: A Constraint-Based Framework for Persistence, Consciousness, and Scientific Explanation

Abstract

This work presents a constraint-based meta-framework for understanding persistent foundational dualities across physics, biology, and consciousness studies. Rather than proposing new physical mechanisms or historical cosmologies, it formalizes a post-reductionist perspective in which no globally sufficient singular description of reality is admissible. The framework replaces substance with persistence as the primary ontological primitive and treats irreducible dualities (e.g., wave–particle, observer–observed, gene–environment) as structural necessities rather than epistemic gaps. Scientific progress is reframed as translation between complementary descriptions instead of unification by collapse. Consciousness is formally introduced as a coherence-seeking interface process that operates across irreducible dualities, explaining its persistent tension with fragmentation and meaning without invoking metaphysical claims, panpsychism, or interventionist implications. From the axioms follow explicit structural limits, including the impossibility of a final theory, a total observer, permanent non-dual consciousness, or total control of complex systems. The framework is compatible with existing physical and biological theories and is intended as a stabilizing methodological guide for post-reductionist science. Ethical containment is built in by design: no inference from this work licenses the manipulation, collapse, or redesign of foundational dualities.