Time and the Origins of Consciousness: An Overview
Creators: name: McClure, Joseph
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: subject: Consciousness
subject: Time and consciousness
subject: Astrocytes
subject: Predictive coding
subject: Global workspace theory
subject: Temporal
subject: Entropy and self-organization
subject: Relational quantum mechanics
subject: Free energy principle
subject: Time perception
subject: neuroscience
subject: Quantum Mechanics
subject: Phenomenology of time
subject: Metabolic
subject: Artificial Intelligence
subject: Self-model
subject: Neural oscillations
subject: Entropy
subject: Rovelli
subject: Friston

description: This is an overview and conceptual sketch of my framework, an alternative to both materialist-reductionist models (consciousness = computation) and panpsychism (everything is conscious). Instead, it suggests that consciousness is the recursive stabilization of time. In it consciousness is framed not as computation or information processing but the structured stabilization of time across nested scales. This model presents an integrated framework where neural, metabolic, and oscillatory dynamics function to maintain temporal coherence, ensuring the persistence of self-referential experience. Astrocytes regulate the metabolic constraints that determine which signals persist in conscious awareness, acting as a gating mechanism for temporal stability. Predictive coding minimizes free energy not just for sensory accuracy but to sustain a coherent self-model across time. Neural oscillations synchronize across fast (gamma), mid-range (beta), and slow (delta) timescales to prevent fragmentation of experience. Sensory modalities impose distinct temporal architectures—vision spatializes time, hearing structures it as an unfolding process, and interoception binds it to metabolic rhythms. This model reframes consciousness as a phase transition in self-sustaining temporal organization rather than an emergent property of information processing.

Time emerges through a hierarchy of stabilizations across scales, transitioning from an abstract relational structure to a coherent, organized process. At the quantum scale, time exists only as probabilistic correlations between entangled systems, lacking intrinsic directionality. Classical-scale decoherence stabilizes these correlations into irreversible sequences, establishing the thermodynamic arrow of time. Biological systems internalize this directionality through metabolism and circadian rhythms, transforming external temporal structures into self-sustaining cycles that regulate physiological and cognitive processes. At the neural scale, predictive coding and oscillatory activity actively structure time, integrating past, present, and future into a dynamic framework that prevents perceptual fragmentation. Consciousness emerges as the highest-order stabilization, recursively binding experiences into a self-sustaining temporal attractor. Rather than being an isolated entity, the self is a wave of structured time, continuously stabilizing itself through recursive feedback, ensuring the persistence of experience against entropic dissipation. Instead of asking, How does neural computation produce experience? We’re instead saying consciousness is what happens when a system stabilizes its own temporal coherence against entropy.