Informational Ontology and Its Nearest Neighbors: A Comparative Note

Function in corpus

Positioning document for philosophically-informed readers. Situates IO relative to adjacent frameworks, preventing category errors and clarifying why apparent terminological similarities do not represent convergence on the same project.

Details

This comparative note situates Informational Ontology relative to the philosophical frameworks it most closely neighbors. It is not a defense of IO, nor a critique of those frameworks. It is a map. The frameworks considered — Floridi's Philosophy of Information, Deacon's teleodynamics, Friston's Free Energy Principle, and Bateson's informational difference — were identified through blind comparative analysis against IO's foundational paper. Each shares significant territory with IO. None occupies the same position. For each neighbor, the note identifies what the frameworks share, where they diverge, and why the divergence is substantive rather than terminological. Floridi's Informational Structural Realism is the closest in foundational ambition — both treat information as ontologically primitive and reject reduction to physics, semantics, or mental states. Deacon's teleodynamics shares IO's non-teleological approach to emergence but grounds it in physical thermodynamics. Friston's Free Energy Principle shares the self-organization framework but is a computational-neuroscience model rather than an ontological framework. Bateson's difference is the earliest ancestor of IO's foundational move, but remains at the level of intuition. A final section addresses IO's non-standard use of Awareness, Value, Meaning, and Purpose — explaining why the departures from standard philosophical usage are structural necessities.

Availability

This paper is listed for orientation and dependency tracking. No public PDF or Zenodo record is linked yet.