Core terms

The minimal condition of non-identity: if nothing differs, nothing can be tracked, related, stabilized, or described.

The structured contrasts, boundaries, and gradients among differences. Relation is not added to difference; it is what it means for differences to stand in contrast.

Structured difference that rules in and rules out possibilities. Information is structural: it does not require an observer, language, or semantic interpretation.

Informational registration: information is taken up internally so that the system’s informational state constrains its future state-space. This is a minimal structural notion (not a theory of phenomenal consciousness).

Differential constraint on awareness: some continuations preserve a system’s organization and others degrade it. Value is “better/worse for the system” before morality.

Structured value within awareness: patterns of value and expectation organized across contexts and over time. Meaning is not assumed to be representation or truth-conditions; those are later, optional specializations.

Value-guided meaningful trajectory: stable tendencies/projects in which meaning and value shape a system’s action over time without invoking final causes or teleology as primitives.

Structural restriction on what transitions are possible. In IO, constraint is not “a cause”; it is a shape of the state-space that filters continuation.

A structural before/after relation that enables persistence and re-identification. Ordering is not assumed to be time as a substance; time is treated as a refinement of ordering under asymmetric constraint.

Multiple distinct configurations that are equally viable under the current constraints (underdetermined next-step). Degeneracy forces resolution without smuggling in randomness, external choice, or goal-optimization.

What becomes selectable/noticeable inside awareness. Salience shaping can structurally narrow an agent’s available transitions without coercion.

A stabilized level of organization defined by what constraints must hold for the system to persist and function at that level (e.g., informational, awareness, value regimes).

Compatibility between constraint regimes, not shared goals/values. Two systems are aligned when they can operate under mutually compatible constraints without collapsing coherence or erasing the other’s action space.