Toward an Ontology of Experience and Constraint: Idealism, Normativity, and Life

This article proposes an experiential monist ontology that inverts physicalism’s explanatory priority by positing primitive qualitative actuality—the intrinsic “something it is like” character of existence—as the singular ground of reality. Engaging with analytic idealism and basal cognition research, it argues that structure, multiplicity, life, and individuated consciousness arise immanently through self-generated constraints: immanent limitations on experiential transitions that stabilize patterns and enable persistent structure. Generativity, intrinsic to phenomenality, provides the capacity for differentiation and becoming, while layered constraints progressively stabilize this activity into physical regularities, biological closure, and integrated selfhood. Normativity is grounded in constraint asymmetries, while representationalism and illusionism are critiqued as mischaracterizing contingent disclosure. Altered states, including dreams and psychedelic experiences, illustrate flexible regimes of articulation, and implications for artificial intelligence emphasize endogenous closure over functional simulation. Physicalism is recontextualized as a restricted abstraction of stable, perspective-independent constraints. The resulting framework offers a unified account of phenomenality, physical structure, life, and selfhood without invoking ontological dualism or brute emergence.