The fundamental dynamics of consciousness may be timeless, without increasing entropy. Our linear experience of time is an emergent property created by the loss of information when that timeless reality is projected into our limited human interface.
This theory posits that our lives don't *create* subjective experiences (qualia). Instead, our lives are the emergent result of a fundamental consciousness cycling through a sequence of possible qualia, dictated by probabilistic, Markovian rules.
Challenging the binary view of free will, a new mathematical model could show that individual agents (us) and the larger conscious systems they form can both possess genuine free will simultaneously, operating at different but interconnected scales.
Our perception is like viewing the entire Twitterverse through a single, highly curated feed. We experience a tiny, biased projection of a much larger network of conscious agents, leading to a distorted and incomplete view of the total underlying reality.
For a simulated reality to be coherent for multiple observers, it must have "persistence"—objects and laws that remain consistent. The moon appears the same to everyone who looks, ensuring a stable, shared experience, much like assets in a multiplayer game.
When we observe neurons, we are not seeing the true substrate of thought. Instead, we are seeing our 'headset's' symbolic representation of the complex conscious agent dynamics that are responsible for creating our interface in the first place.
The fine-tuning of physical constants, which seems suspiciously perfect, can be explained not by a divine creator but by a programmer using a pre-existing physics model (like "Einstein's physics" from the Unreal Engine store) for a simulation.
Even Donald Hoffman, proponent of the consciousness-first model, admits his emotions and intuition resist his theory. He relies solely on the logical force of mathematics to advance, demonstrating that groundbreaking ideas often feel profoundly wrong before they can be proven.
Donald Hoffman sees our 3D world as a confining, "training wheels" version of existence. Given the choice, he would exit this simulation to explore higher-dimensional realities with far richer sensory and emotional possibilities, viewing it as an upgrade rather than a loss.
In a reality where spacetime is not fundamental, physical objects like neurons are merely "rendered" upon observation. Therefore, neurons cannot be the fundamental creator of consciousness because they don't exist independently until an observer interacts with them.
Turning intuition into precise mathematics is vital because the math can reveal consequences the theory's creator never anticipated. Einstein himself didn't foresee and initially rejected the existence of black holes, a direct prediction from his own equations.
To move from philosophy to science, abstract theories about consciousness must make concrete, falsifiable predictions about the physical world. Hoffman's work attempts this by proposing precise mathematical links between conscious agent dynamics and observable particle properties like mass and spin.