process ontology - TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE

This white paper presents a transdisciplinary metaphysical framework of generative folding as the foundational process of emergence, coherence, and transformation across all domains of life and knowledge. Rooted in the triadic ontology of threshold, mirror, and scaffold, and expressed through spatial, temporal, energetic, and symbolic dimensions, folding is articulated as the primary gesture through which the Kosmos structures form, integrates meaning, and becomes self-aware.

Integrating insights from developmental biology, semiotics, physics, cognitive science, process philosophy, and spiritual traditions, this paper proposes that constraint is not a limit to be overcome but a generative act that enables coherence. Through recursive foldings, systems complexify, interiorize, and relationally deepen — forming a teleodynamic spiral guided not by entailing laws but by absent attractors of higher coherence.

Applications in medicine, governance, education, AI, and spirituality are explored, revealing how systems can be redesigned as folded architectures of meaning. This culminates in a symbolic epistemology that reunites perception, thought, and participation in the evolving grammar of the Real.

This chapter attempts to illuminate the dynamic stability of the organism and the robustness of its developmental pathway by considering the biology of cancer. Healthy development and stable functioning of a multicellular organism require an exquisitely regulated balance between processes of cell division, differentiation, and death (apoptosis). Cancer involves a disruption of this balance, which results in unregulated cell proliferation. The thesis defended in this chapter is that the coupling between proliferation and differentiation, whether normal or pathological (as in cancer), is best understood within a process-ontological framework. This framework emphasizes the interactions and mutual stabilizations between processes at different levels and this, in turn, explains the difficulty in allocating the neoplastic process to any particular level (genetic, epigenetic, cellular, or histological). Understanding these interactions is likely to be a precondition of a proper understanding of how these mutual regulations are disrupted in the processes we call cancerous.