**7. Summary and Conclusions**

In the spirit of this paper, and its emphasis on process rather than products, we see our 'conclusion' also as not final but as a pointer toward processes leading to further and better descriptions of reality. Our description here of reality and its philosophy simply assumes that we apply certain schemes of valid reasoning which are nevertheless based on reasoning as an ontological as well as epistemological process. The reasoning can still be formal or informal. Formal reasoning has proven to be a powerful tool for understanding our world. However, the application of formal reasoning, like any human cognitive process, is partly informal and cannot be fully grasped in terms of formal logic alone. This process is *dialectical* in that if different solutions are present at the same time the optimal one is chosen. It has been described for example by Magnani [140], following Peirce, as abduction, but in our view this approach is limited to an epistemology. It does resemble the search for proper Gödel numbers to analyze the validity of formal description in the proof of the incompleteness theorem. Wittgenstein was the first who suggested that such epistemological processes appear as language games, and their formalization can be processed as description of moves in games. This is achieved in the theory of defeasible reasoning, which is the reasoning that is rationally compelling, though not deductively valid. The approaches to set the limits of formalization of dialectics have been developed by such philosophers as Nicholas Rescher [141], Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst [142], but, again, mainly in the relation to argumentation in communication as solely a linguistic process. A more advanced dynamic approach with application to the nature of consciousness itself is being developed by Yukio-Pegio Gunji et al. [143]. They propose a measurement-oriented inference system comprising Bayesian and inverse Bayesian inferences. In this model, Bayesian inference contracts the probability space while the inverse inference relaxes it which allows a subject to make a decision corresponding to an immediate change in the environment. To date, this model with two inferences represents the best attempt at a representation of the dialectical discourse by means of formal models.

To the extent that dialectics also refers to informal reasoning, the question arises how discourse based on informal reasoning is possible in the real world before the appearance of consciousness. As Engels [15] stated, "nature is the proof of dialectics", and such statements sound like the action of Diogenes who proved the reality of movement by walking as his 'dynamic' refutation of Zeno's paradoxes. In fact, dialectics is an example of informal reasoning itself. The answer to our question lies in the fact that the Being that becomes the Being-in-Reality (*Dasein* in the Heideggerian terms) appears as a multiplicity of the forms of existence for which we have proposed the term ontolons. (Our 'multiplicity of forms' is clearly related to the insights of classical Chinese formulations [144]).

Ontolons are thus the dynamic counterparts of well-known prior entities, namely, the monad and the 'Thing-in-Itself'. Each ontolon, besides the property of deterministic mechanical movement arising from its spatio-temporality (*res extensa*), possesses the property that manifests the internal self (*res cogitans*). Even in its simplest forms it is exhibited in unpredictable (non-deterministic in mechanical sense) movement. This is what Epicurus called the *clinamen*. Being unpredictable originally, it can become controlled in communication between ontolons, in which a reduction of potentialities for totally free movement takes place.

In reality, of course, we are now in the domain of the further *res potentia* of Heisenberg, reviewed recently by Brenner in [145]. In this discourse, ontolons can be seen as forming more advanced structures, in which potentiality inheres *a priori*, leading finally to the appearance of epistemic properties corresponding to life and finally consciousness. The reality in this framework can be represented as a set of forms of existence capable of a continuous process of complexification in which the most optimal realizations can occur. This is what Luhn [146] has called, coming from the side of Information Science, the 'search' by the universe for new dynamic states.

Self is seen as the principle that governs *clinamina*. We cannot see the self as we do not have "window" (in the Leibniz sense) to see it but we can logically deduce its existence through the observation of reduction of potentialities that takes place and thus we have access to "Processes-in-Themselves", as ontolons. We become involved in the Processes-in-Themselves in a such a way—better we *are* those processes—that we are able to apply formal reasoning to them (and eventually compute those which are computable.) But, to repeat, the process of discovery via formal reasoning remains informal and appears as a dialectical process occurring in nature. A very suggestive link can be made here to the concept of Natural Computation currently being developed by Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic [147] and others. As stated above, it should be described within a framework that includes both ontic and epistemic processes and their relations, united via the transcending cognitive logical operations involving potential and actual states in interaction. The logic of the included middle introduced by Lupasco [35] in its current version as Logic in Reality [1] provides such a framework.
