Physical pluralism

Physical pluralism or pluralistic physicalism develops a non-monistic conception of physical reality by distinguishing the Everything—the totality of physical universes, mathematical and logical structures, and potentially unknown categories of entities—from the omniverse, understood specifically as the totality of universes. It argues that physicalism does not entail universal monism, a single fundamental physical kernel, or a globally unified causal structure. Instead, physicalism remains compatible with multiple possibilities concerning fundamental physics, including distinct foundational structures, Everettian interpretations, causally disconnected universes, and alternative forms of causal organization. The framework introduces ontological-foundations logical pluralism as a further hypothesis: physical reality may possess plural foundational structures within a universe, or infinitely many distinct multiverses whose universes are governed by fundamentally different foundational logics. This differs from conventional logical pluralism, which primarily concerns logical consequence and validity. Drawing on incompleteness, diagonalization, and computability-theoretic limits, the framework argues that no sufficiently general formal system can be assumed to provide a complete, universally decodable representation of reality. It therefore proposes that physical reality may be structurally non-totalizable: an indefinitely unfolding multiplicity rather than a single closed physical or axiomatic system. The proposal does not reject physicalism; rather, it separates physicalism from the stronger and independently unestablished thesis of universal physical monism.