The Unity of Matter and Spirit: From Energy Monism to Hierarchical Constraints

The relationship between matter and spirit is one of the oldest and most profound puzzles in philosophy. Cartesian dualism separates them into two substances, materialism reduces spirit to a property of matter, and idealism regards matter as a manifestation of spirit—none of which provide a self-consistent ontological account. This paper develops a solution within the framework of Energy-Efficiency Theory (EET) based on three axioms. We propose Hierarchical Monism: matter is the steady-state structure of energy under low-level constraints (bound state), information is the texture of energy distribution, and spirit is the inertial consolidation of information in cognitive systems—a higher-order constraint…