Did you not connect sitting-still with being “in the now” before?
It’s like “going to work” while your partner “stays home”, doing lots of…stuff, then returning and thinking “time passed”.
The worker was wearing themselves out. The sitter was gaining pounds and loosing muscle…that’s it.
The world is actually a-lot more like The Sims than many like to admit.
Proof…utterly ridiculous.
This is why I like to call learning remembering - because we know everything already, or have access to it while in the now; everything happens now – it always did:
And how about this: gravity isn’t a weak force. It’s strong, it just has much to focus on - almost enough to use it up.
As an aside, this is really a dense read, but it seems to me that contemplative practices' claims of no time are, perforce, using the terminology of time . . . doesn't saying we only live in the present use a function of how we define time?
Plus, I'm not sure (I lost you in a few places) how a physical experiment gets extrapolated into what consciousness is. Much like contemplative practices and experiences with psychedelics, we're using a given altered state to reach conclusions about a different state, and saying one is truer than another. Again, not a physicist, and someone who finds most metaphysical claims a bit self-serving and sometimes overreaching, I don't see a clear connection between the experiment and drawing conclusions about consciousness.
I agree with your second paragraph. I do not see any scientific proof that soul does not exist. - a statement Mike Brock made in the post as I recall. But I do believe, along with Goedel, that this adds physics proof to mathematics that General AI is impossible for axiomatic computing systems such as classical & QM computers. I said General AI. I did not say generative or agentic AI.
There's no link I can see between the experiment and computability, and it says nothing about the feasibility of AGI on any hardware. I could be misunderstanding your statement, and I don't know what any of this has to do with the soul
I had to use Claude so you're probably still smarter than me, but....
This is a piece that has a legitimate scientific core but is doing a lot of philosophical overreach on top of it, and the author's self-congratulatory framing makes it harder to take seriously than it should be.
**What's real**
The Birmingham experiment is genuine and interesting. The Page-Wootters mechanism (1983) proposed that in a closed quantum system, time could emerge from entanglement between subsystems rather than being an external parameter. The Birmingham group appears to have demonstrated this in a many-body system — rubidium atoms acting as each other's clocks through entropic correlation. That's a meaningful experimental advance. The author's description of the physics is mostly accurate.
**Where it goes wrong**
The leap from "time is reconstructed from internal correlations in a quantum system" to "therefore the eternal now is real, consciousness is the universe knowing itself, and the hard problem of consciousness dissolves" is enormous, and the article doesn't earn it. Each step involves smuggling in additional commitments that the experiment says nothing about. The rubidium result constrains how we model time in quantum gravity. It doesn't touch the phenomenology of conscious experience, Buddhist metaphysics, or Spinozan dual-aspect monism — those are entirely separate domains with entirely separate burdens of proof.
The Many-Worlds dismissal is particularly weak. Many-Worlds doesn't require an external time parameter in the way the author implies — the formalism is already compatible with relational time treatments. "One more weight on a collapsing structure" is rhetoric, not argument.
**The self-positioning problem**
The author's "I want the receipts clear" passage — essentially claiming the experiment vindicated his personal philosophical framework — is the most intellectually dishonest part. The Page-Wootters mechanism has been in the literature for 40 years. Arguing in essays that time is relational and then treating a quantum gravity experiment as personal validation is not how intellectual credit works. The experiment confirmed a 40-year-old theoretical idea; it didn't confirm this author's Substack.
**What's actually interesting underneath**
Strip the grandiosity and there's a real story: the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always implied a timeless universe at the quantum gravity level, and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics has always contained an unacknowledged assumption about external time. The Birmingham experiment tightens the empirical case that time is emergent rather than fundamental. That's genuinely significant for foundations of physics. It doesn't need the mysticism layered on top — the physics is already strange enough.
The writing is fluent and the author is clearly intelligent, but the piece reads as someone using a real scientific result as a mirror for ideas they already held. The Buddhists-got-there-first framing, the Spinoza callback, the consciousness-as-indexing theory — all of it was already written before the experiment, and the experiment is now being recruited to confirm it. That's motivated reasoning dressed up as philosophy of physics.
Worth reading for the experiment itself. Treat everything past the first three sections with skepticism.
One more thing. You told me you used Claude. That's fine, but it changes what this exchange is. The objections you're posting are not the objections of a reader who worked through the argument. They are the objections a general-purpose LLM produces when asked to critique a philosophical essay that makes strong claims about consciousness — the reflexive "philosophical overreach" charge, the "motivated reasoning" charge, the reflex to treat any connection between physics and phenomenology as suspect. Those are Claude's priors, not yours, and they are not particularly good priors when the essay in question is doing the work of connecting a specific experimental result to a framework already on record. If you want to engage with what the piece actually argues, that's a conversation I'll have. If you want to post Claude's boilerplate defense of the analytic consensus, I'll let it stand and other readers can decide.
I am not self-congratulating. I am putting a stake in the ground against those who dismiss this as pseudoscience and philosophical "overreach" as this has been my biggest personal research project over two years. I expect empirical results in astronomy and experimentalists in particle physics to ultimately vindicate me. I may end up with an egg on my face. But I'm going to take credit for my work, if I'm proven right, yes. If you or Claude thinks that diminishes my credibility, you can go on thinking that fully disabused of the notion that I am bothered by the quiet judgement of others.
Agreed. I used Claude for two reasons. First, I’m interested in quantum physics but don’t know it well enough to know the implications of t in Schroedinger’s equation without further research. Second, because your claims were so broad and, yes, self-congratulatory. Claude’s responses were pretty much what I expected. I know it was a short cut, but the level of interest I carry didn’t justify the full deep dive that your ideas may deserve. No offense intended.
This is quite deep and fascinating, but I'm afraid I lack some basic knowledge (of physics, I think?) to be able to really follow it in detail. I'm off to study some of the terms you use, like "coherence." In the meantime, I'm left with two impressions: "I think this is important" and "I don't really get it."
It's a cool paper and a very cool experiment, almost absolute zero in fact. But at some level it seems like it only proves that entropy and the Boltzman constant do in fact have the same units (this seems to be the assumption behind equation 3). I wish I had more depth on the following: σ combined with Δ(τ ) seems like a parameter fit. That is to say, it seems like σ gives you a way to substitute entropy for time specifically for small clouds of very cold rubidium, and one would need to run a new experiment and get a new conversion factor for small clouds of very cold something else.
Not a physicist, but I read a fair amount. I’d be interested to see how this works with Bell’s Inequality. Seems like if you take the “t” variable out, then “instantaneous” action at a distance is no longer an issue. Likewise with the holographic universe. If all that exists is a surface of made of Bloch spheres (abstractions) encoding information about entropy, then the experiment would seem easier to explain
"...consciousness is not a property added on top of the physics. It is the inside view of a system sufficiently rich in correlations to be indexing itself."
To me, this screams "emergent property of a sufficiently complex system which interacts with the global field of entropic correlations, which are 'equivalent to' the flow of time". A system complex enough to accumulate an internal record of the changes in correlations within itself and in its sensory input from the outside universe, and apply that internal record to its future actions taken in that universe.
"The only places where actual knowledge is being generated are the local attractors capable of refining their own filtration." Again, to me this says that knowledge is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system, a "local attractor".
I just don't see a great deal of separation between the "primacy of the indexing" that you espouse, making consciousness "fundamental", and the primacy of the complexity that I espouse, allowing each complex entity to have its own "index" into the ever-changing global field of entropy that the Universe consists of. Who is to say whether my "now" and your "now" are truly the same?
Glenn, you're right that the operational predictions are very close, and the burden is on me to say where the difference actually lives. It is not in the conditions under which consciousness shows up — we agree on those. It is in what consciousness is when it does.
Emergentism says: matter, configured complexly enough, produces an inside view as a higher-order property. There is a step, however well-disguised, between the matter and the inside. The "hard problem" of consciousness is the demand that emergentism explain that step — why this configuration of matter has someone home and that one does not. Historically the answer has been "it just does, at sufficient complexity," which is a restatement of the puzzle rather than a resolution.
Dual-aspect monism, which is what the framework actually commits to, denies the step. There is one substance — coherence — and matter and consciousness are not two things one of which produces the other. They are two aspects under which the same substance is describable. Matter is coherence viewed from outside. Mind is coherence viewed from inside, when the inside is recursive enough to fold back on itself. The inside is not added at complexity; it is co-fundamental with the outside, and they become richer in lockstep as coherence becomes more recursive.
This is not a semantic difference. It predicts (a) that inside-ness is co-extensive with coherence, not gated by a complexity threshold — the rubidium cloud has a thin but nonzero inside, not zero inside; (b) that the measurement problem dissolves rather than persisting, because the system is always being indexed by its own coherence at whatever depth it has, and "measurement" is propagation of indexical correlation into a sector deep enough to record it; (c) that death is the dispersal of this particular indexing structure rather than the destruction of inside-ness as such. Emergentism cannot say any of these things, because for emergentism the inside is a property of a configuration, and properties go where configurations go.
Your last question — whether your "now" and mine are truly the same — is exactly the right one, and the framework's answer is no, and they aren't, and that's not a problem, that's the point. There is no overarching synchronization. Each indexed sector is its own filtration; each "now" is the leading edge of one indexing activity. Spinoza saw this. Einstein saw the relativistic version. The framework says it the third way: simultaneity is not a feature of the universe, it is a feature of an indexing activity, and different activities do not share one.
The reason I press on this distinction rather than letting it slide into emergentism is that the second reading is the one that does the work in quantum gravity. Emergentism leaves the measurement problem, the problem of time in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem all in place. Dual-aspect monism dissolves them in one move. I need the stronger ontology because it is the one that closes the seams the framework is trying to close.
OK, I think we are actually really close to the same page and just don't know it, partly because your answers have revised and clarified my thinking on the subject.
You ask: "why this configuration of matter has someone home and that one does not?" (By "someone home" I assume you mean a consciousness.) You also state that "the rubidium cloud has a thin but nonzero inside, not zero inside". I have come to a similar conclusion. Consciousness is not a binary; it is a multi-dimensional spectrum, and I believe I tried and failed to express this before in my discussions of beehives and mycorrhizal networks. (As an aside, some recent work I saw seems to indicate that bees can learn to use tools to solve challenges, meaning that bees might be "conscious" as well as the hive being a different "conscious".) I would argue that the rubidium cloud is not "conscious" by the traditional definition, in that it does not record the past nor attempt to use it to influence the future, but I will concede that it has an "inside" by some definition; only a perfect vacuum, bereft of matter and energy, would have no "inside". (Very much like the state of the heads of our current heads of state.)
You write: "The inside is not added at complexity; it is co-fundamental with the outside, and they become richer in lockstep as coherence becomes more recursive." I completely agree with this; there isn't a universal threshold beyond which "non-consciousness" becomes "consciousness". It's a gradient, a multi-dimensional spectrum, and the consciousness grows richer with the level of complexity (as you say, recursiveness, a strong form of complexity). Looking at the same thing in different ways can reveal different "forms" of consciousness operating at different organizational levels, as in the bees and the beehive.
You also state: "There is no overarching synchronization. Each indexed sector is its own filtration; each "now" is the leading edge of one indexing activity." Somehow I had extracted an implied synchronization, an implied oneness, from what you had written on consciousness and indexing; that somehow information could be transmitted in some way between conscious beings purely through whatever they were indexing in common. This implies that I was dead wrong, and information can only be exchanged as provided for by the laws of matter and energy, i.e. the writing of books, recording of sounds and video, the scratches on the cave wall, ...
I'd love a paper on how dual-aspect monism "dissolves" the measurement problem (I assume you mean the need for an observer in Quantum Mechanics), the problem of time in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (which the Wikipedia article did not help me to understand at all), and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem (necessitating a "conscious" observer). But that would be a subject for a long essay, not a reply in this format, I'm sure. Personally, I think QM is a collection of elegant mathematics that accurately models and predicts the realm of the very tiny, but that metaphysical claims about "waveform collapse" are grossly overstated and misrepresented. (Or the waveform itself is at all times both simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed, the ultimate version of Schroedinger Cat.)
Glenn, this is the version of the exchange I hoped we'd get to. Two small sharpenings and then a pointer.
On the vacuum: even a "perfect vacuum" isn't bereft of coherence. QFT vacuum states have structured correlations — vacuum fluctuations, entanglement across regions, the whole apparatus. The vacuum has a very thin inside because it has coherent structure at all. Inside-ness doesn't map to "matter and energy present"; it maps to "coherent structure present" — which is everywhere, because that's what a universe is. Small correction but it matters when the question turns to horizons and what can and cannot be indexed.
On the waveform being simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed: you're one step from the framework's answer. It is not alternating and it is not occupying two states at once. It is one coherent structure, and "collapsed" and "uncollapsed" are two descriptions — one from outside a measurement context, one from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome. Nothing collapsed. The description changed because the standpoint changed.
The measurement problem, the Wheeler-DeWitt problem of time, and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem are the same problem, three ways. They dissolve together, and they dissolve because all three ask for an account of how something "happens" (collapse, temporal flow, observer intervention) that isn't happening — that is instead a feature of what happens when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk. The paper I linked earlier walks through this in detail; the version currently up is not quite the version that will be up in a few days, because the Barontini result requires an update, but the treatment of those three problems is already there and is the reason the framework is worth taking seriously.
Thanks for pushing on this. The reason I press on dual-aspect monism rather than sophisticated emergentism is not that they predict different things about beehives or rubidium clouds. It is that emergentism leaves those three problems in place, and dual-aspect monism dissolves them because it denies the step between matter and inside. Denying that step is what closes the seam quantum gravity has been failing to close for a century. That's the load-bearing wall.
After I wrote the previous response, it occurred to me that in this statement: "Inside-ness doesn't map to 'matter and energy present'; it maps to 'coherent structure present'", and in several other places in your writings and responses, you seem to be treating "coherence" and "correlation" as a separate *thing*, independent of the stuff (mass / energy / space / time[entropy]) that makes up the Universe. But it's not; it's a measured property of the stuff that makes up the Universe, just as "temperature" and "pressure" are measured properties of a volume of matter (in the case of a gas, the motion of the matter within the volume, hence the ideal gas law).
And "when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk" is just another way of saying "when a consciousness records the behavior of a correlated, coherent system". You haven't removed the need for consciousness; you've just hidden it in the obfuscation of phrases like "indexed sector" and "unindexed bulk". Your "indices" are just a record of past correlations in a coherent structure (i.e. memory), and thus an "indexed sector" appears to be a sufficiently complex structure that it records correlations as memory, which is a consciousness. And a consciousness must store its memories as properties of the stuff that makes up the Universe, though we don't fully understand exactly how the hardware does it, but we know it does because selective loss of hardware can cause selective loss of indices (memory).
In other words, in my view, you seem to be invoking a mystical "indexed coherence field" which exists independently of the stuff that makes up the Universe, for which there is no evidence other than your assertion that it exists, because it happens to solve problems that you'd like to solve. That's the same as invoking "dark matter" and "dark energy" to solve cosmological problem that may not actually exist, or invoking "aether" to propagate light waves through space.
I'm afraid your paper will have to wait for the long weekend.
But for now, let's start with your "inside". You state that "the vacuum has a very thin inside because it has coherent structure at all. Inside-ness doesn't map to 'matter and energy present'; it maps to 'coherent structure present'." Yet there is nothing in the universe other than matter and energy (which are the same thing, as Einstein showed), and space itself for the mass-energy to occupy, to provide the coherent structure. If there is something else in the Universe that makes up the coherent structure, I am unaware of it, and it definitely sounds like aether, or the Force, or the god in the gap. (There is no "time" as you've already shown; merely a field of evolving entropic correlations amongst the mass-energy which we crudely regard as the passage of "time". And I am discounting "dark matter" and "dark energy" as unexplained forms of matter and energy, if they exist at all.)
You then state that "Inside-ness...maps to 'coherent structure present' — which is everywhere, because that's what a universe is." That is a tautology; you are sidestepping defining the inside-ness by defining it in reference to the thing which contains it, rather than what provides it or makes it up. It would, I believe, be equivalent to say that the Universe is a fractally-dimensional coherent structure of mass-energy, which implies that the Universe has structured correlations at all possible scales, from the Planck scale to the Universe itself. But the correlations are not independent of the mass-energy within the Universe, they *are* the mass-energy within the Universe. There's no separate "inside".
Hence, to get back to consciousness for a moment. The Universe is made up of coherent structures of mass-energy at all scales. Consciousness is what happens as a coherent structure gains the ability to maintain a record of past correlations, and apply that record to its future states (and this second statement may not actually be needed). It's easy enough to define in this way, but terribly difficult to recognize. For example, is there a separation between instinctual behavior and consciousness? (I am not programmed to respond in that area.) And it's not a binary; there are "greater" and "lesser" degrees of consciousness. Humans, having gained the ability to record and apply correlations outside of themselves and the duration of their individual existence, may be at a greater level of consciousness than, say, bees.
You then say, "On the waveform being simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed...'collapsed' and 'uncollapsed' are two descriptions — one from outside a measurement context, one from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome. Nothing collapsed." So by "from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome" I assume you mean "from inside a structure that has recorded the outcome"...which states in a roundabout way that a consciousness is required. Only a conscious structure is able to record the outcome. If that's the case, we go directly to von Neumann-Wigner. If that's not the case, then every individual particle of matter and quantum of energy is independently conscious, and consciousness has no meaning.
Finally, you state, "They dissolve because all three ask for an account of how something "happens" (collapse, temporal flow, observer intervention) that isn't happening — that is instead a feature of what happens when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk." What is an "indexed sector"? It's apparently not mass-energy according to you. It is space itself? How is it indexed? What is the indexing agent? Where is the indexing agent and its index stored if not in mass-energy? Is it just a level of recursive complexity in the arrangement of mass-energy, which is consciousness? Who's on first? von Neumann-Wigner....third base!
My perception of time fluctuates radically based on my internal state due to my ADHD. My fascination with consciousness stems largely from my personal observations that my entire perception of reality including time seems relative to my internal state of being which makes no sense if time was truly some external quantifiable objective thing in the universe. I have always felt the buddhists were on the right track but could not really explain why. This is all very interesting to think about.
Prigogine proved that the entropy operator was not continuous across the QM -Classical interface. I think that was in the 1980s. Mike’s post is about General vs Special Relativity impacts, but clearly there is a link. This is huge. It also has implications for General AI. No axiomatic based computing system can likely include this except as an approximation- at least I hope that is true. There will always be a need for a person in the loop for the foreseeable future. Thx for the post!
I need to re-read your essay since I'm neither a philosopher, a physicist, nor a buddhist. It did lead me back to Shannon Stirone's https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22150990/2020-time-covid-warp-year-end - which is, in my opinion, a beautiful exploration of more classical concepts of time.
So now I ask myself, If I really want to understand what "Time is what one part of a correlated system does with respect to another part of the same system" means, should I challenge myself to understand the mathematics and science, or should I meditate?
My head hurts. I will go watch cat videos and come back to reread. Several times.
Yay..... I think....
That’s a very wordy “honey, I’m home…”
Did you not connect sitting-still with being “in the now” before?
It’s like “going to work” while your partner “stays home”, doing lots of…stuff, then returning and thinking “time passed”.
The worker was wearing themselves out. The sitter was gaining pounds and loosing muscle…that’s it.
The world is actually a-lot more like The Sims than many like to admit.
Proof…utterly ridiculous.
This is why I like to call learning remembering - because we know everything already, or have access to it while in the now; everything happens now – it always did:
And how about this: gravity isn’t a weak force. It’s strong, it just has much to focus on - almost enough to use it up.
What does this do to determinism?
As an aside, this is really a dense read, but it seems to me that contemplative practices' claims of no time are, perforce, using the terminology of time . . . doesn't saying we only live in the present use a function of how we define time?
Plus, I'm not sure (I lost you in a few places) how a physical experiment gets extrapolated into what consciousness is. Much like contemplative practices and experiences with psychedelics, we're using a given altered state to reach conclusions about a different state, and saying one is truer than another. Again, not a physicist, and someone who finds most metaphysical claims a bit self-serving and sometimes overreaching, I don't see a clear connection between the experiment and drawing conclusions about consciousness.
I agree with your second paragraph. I do not see any scientific proof that soul does not exist. - a statement Mike Brock made in the post as I recall. But I do believe, along with Goedel, that this adds physics proof to mathematics that General AI is impossible for axiomatic computing systems such as classical & QM computers. I said General AI. I did not say generative or agentic AI.
There's no link I can see between the experiment and computability, and it says nothing about the feasibility of AGI on any hardware. I could be misunderstanding your statement, and I don't know what any of this has to do with the soul
I had to use Claude so you're probably still smarter than me, but....
This is a piece that has a legitimate scientific core but is doing a lot of philosophical overreach on top of it, and the author's self-congratulatory framing makes it harder to take seriously than it should be.
**What's real**
The Birmingham experiment is genuine and interesting. The Page-Wootters mechanism (1983) proposed that in a closed quantum system, time could emerge from entanglement between subsystems rather than being an external parameter. The Birmingham group appears to have demonstrated this in a many-body system — rubidium atoms acting as each other's clocks through entropic correlation. That's a meaningful experimental advance. The author's description of the physics is mostly accurate.
**Where it goes wrong**
The leap from "time is reconstructed from internal correlations in a quantum system" to "therefore the eternal now is real, consciousness is the universe knowing itself, and the hard problem of consciousness dissolves" is enormous, and the article doesn't earn it. Each step involves smuggling in additional commitments that the experiment says nothing about. The rubidium result constrains how we model time in quantum gravity. It doesn't touch the phenomenology of conscious experience, Buddhist metaphysics, or Spinozan dual-aspect monism — those are entirely separate domains with entirely separate burdens of proof.
The Many-Worlds dismissal is particularly weak. Many-Worlds doesn't require an external time parameter in the way the author implies — the formalism is already compatible with relational time treatments. "One more weight on a collapsing structure" is rhetoric, not argument.
**The self-positioning problem**
The author's "I want the receipts clear" passage — essentially claiming the experiment vindicated his personal philosophical framework — is the most intellectually dishonest part. The Page-Wootters mechanism has been in the literature for 40 years. Arguing in essays that time is relational and then treating a quantum gravity experiment as personal validation is not how intellectual credit works. The experiment confirmed a 40-year-old theoretical idea; it didn't confirm this author's Substack.
**What's actually interesting underneath**
Strip the grandiosity and there's a real story: the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always implied a timeless universe at the quantum gravity level, and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics has always contained an unacknowledged assumption about external time. The Birmingham experiment tightens the empirical case that time is emergent rather than fundamental. That's genuinely significant for foundations of physics. It doesn't need the mysticism layered on top — the physics is already strange enough.
The writing is fluent and the author is clearly intelligent, but the piece reads as someone using a real scientific result as a mirror for ideas they already held. The Buddhists-got-there-first framing, the Spinoza callback, the consciousness-as-indexing theory — all of it was already written before the experiment, and the experiment is now being recruited to confirm it. That's motivated reasoning dressed up as philosophy of physics.
Worth reading for the experiment itself. Treat everything past the first three sections with skepticism.
One more thing. You told me you used Claude. That's fine, but it changes what this exchange is. The objections you're posting are not the objections of a reader who worked through the argument. They are the objections a general-purpose LLM produces when asked to critique a philosophical essay that makes strong claims about consciousness — the reflexive "philosophical overreach" charge, the "motivated reasoning" charge, the reflex to treat any connection between physics and phenomenology as suspect. Those are Claude's priors, not yours, and they are not particularly good priors when the essay in question is doing the work of connecting a specific experimental result to a framework already on record. If you want to engage with what the piece actually argues, that's a conversation I'll have. If you want to post Claude's boilerplate defense of the analytic consensus, I'll let it stand and other readers can decide.
I am not self-congratulating. I am putting a stake in the ground against those who dismiss this as pseudoscience and philosophical "overreach" as this has been my biggest personal research project over two years. I expect empirical results in astronomy and experimentalists in particle physics to ultimately vindicate me. I may end up with an egg on my face. But I'm going to take credit for my work, if I'm proven right, yes. If you or Claude thinks that diminishes my credibility, you can go on thinking that fully disabused of the notion that I am bothered by the quiet judgement of others.
Who is Claude to say this is overreach? If Claude knew the answers here, it would tell us.
I've given Many-Worlds a serious treatment in a separate piece: https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-many-worlds-interpretation-has
Agreed. I used Claude for two reasons. First, I’m interested in quantum physics but don’t know it well enough to know the implications of t in Schroedinger’s equation without further research. Second, because your claims were so broad and, yes, self-congratulatory. Claude’s responses were pretty much what I expected. I know it was a short cut, but the level of interest I carry didn’t justify the full deep dive that your ideas may deserve. No offense intended.
I really don’t know think you understand the essay. Certainly Claude conflated philosophy with scientific proof.
This is quite deep and fascinating, but I'm afraid I lack some basic knowledge (of physics, I think?) to be able to really follow it in detail. I'm off to study some of the terms you use, like "coherence." In the meantime, I'm left with two impressions: "I think this is important" and "I don't really get it."
I’m with you on this.
I've done some reading and put together my take on this. Which might well be completely off base; I am WAY behind on physics. https://pylimitics.net/do-you-have-the-time/
It's a cool paper and a very cool experiment, almost absolute zero in fact. But at some level it seems like it only proves that entropy and the Boltzman constant do in fact have the same units (this seems to be the assumption behind equation 3). I wish I had more depth on the following: σ combined with Δ(τ ) seems like a parameter fit. That is to say, it seems like σ gives you a way to substitute entropy for time specifically for small clouds of very cold rubidium, and one would need to run a new experiment and get a new conversion factor for small clouds of very cold something else.
Experiment triggering article
Scientist creates 'mini‑universe' to measure time without a clock
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-scientist-miniuniverse-clock.html
Not a physicist, but I read a fair amount. I’d be interested to see how this works with Bell’s Inequality. Seems like if you take the “t” variable out, then “instantaneous” action at a distance is no longer an issue. Likewise with the holographic universe. If all that exists is a surface of made of Bloch spheres (abstractions) encoding information about entropy, then the experiment would seem easier to explain
This brought to mind the ending of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Timescape".
"...consciousness is not a property added on top of the physics. It is the inside view of a system sufficiently rich in correlations to be indexing itself."
To me, this screams "emergent property of a sufficiently complex system which interacts with the global field of entropic correlations, which are 'equivalent to' the flow of time". A system complex enough to accumulate an internal record of the changes in correlations within itself and in its sensory input from the outside universe, and apply that internal record to its future actions taken in that universe.
"The only places where actual knowledge is being generated are the local attractors capable of refining their own filtration." Again, to me this says that knowledge is an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system, a "local attractor".
I just don't see a great deal of separation between the "primacy of the indexing" that you espouse, making consciousness "fundamental", and the primacy of the complexity that I espouse, allowing each complex entity to have its own "index" into the ever-changing global field of entropy that the Universe consists of. Who is to say whether my "now" and your "now" are truly the same?
Glenn, you're right that the operational predictions are very close, and the burden is on me to say where the difference actually lives. It is not in the conditions under which consciousness shows up — we agree on those. It is in what consciousness is when it does.
Emergentism says: matter, configured complexly enough, produces an inside view as a higher-order property. There is a step, however well-disguised, between the matter and the inside. The "hard problem" of consciousness is the demand that emergentism explain that step — why this configuration of matter has someone home and that one does not. Historically the answer has been "it just does, at sufficient complexity," which is a restatement of the puzzle rather than a resolution.
Dual-aspect monism, which is what the framework actually commits to, denies the step. There is one substance — coherence — and matter and consciousness are not two things one of which produces the other. They are two aspects under which the same substance is describable. Matter is coherence viewed from outside. Mind is coherence viewed from inside, when the inside is recursive enough to fold back on itself. The inside is not added at complexity; it is co-fundamental with the outside, and they become richer in lockstep as coherence becomes more recursive.
This is not a semantic difference. It predicts (a) that inside-ness is co-extensive with coherence, not gated by a complexity threshold — the rubidium cloud has a thin but nonzero inside, not zero inside; (b) that the measurement problem dissolves rather than persisting, because the system is always being indexed by its own coherence at whatever depth it has, and "measurement" is propagation of indexical correlation into a sector deep enough to record it; (c) that death is the dispersal of this particular indexing structure rather than the destruction of inside-ness as such. Emergentism cannot say any of these things, because for emergentism the inside is a property of a configuration, and properties go where configurations go.
Your last question — whether your "now" and mine are truly the same — is exactly the right one, and the framework's answer is no, and they aren't, and that's not a problem, that's the point. There is no overarching synchronization. Each indexed sector is its own filtration; each "now" is the leading edge of one indexing activity. Spinoza saw this. Einstein saw the relativistic version. The framework says it the third way: simultaneity is not a feature of the universe, it is a feature of an indexing activity, and different activities do not share one.
The reason I press on this distinction rather than letting it slide into emergentism is that the second reading is the one that does the work in quantum gravity. Emergentism leaves the measurement problem, the problem of time in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem all in place. Dual-aspect monism dissolves them in one move. I need the stronger ontology because it is the one that closes the seams the framework is trying to close.
"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so."
OK, I think we are actually really close to the same page and just don't know it, partly because your answers have revised and clarified my thinking on the subject.
You ask: "why this configuration of matter has someone home and that one does not?" (By "someone home" I assume you mean a consciousness.) You also state that "the rubidium cloud has a thin but nonzero inside, not zero inside". I have come to a similar conclusion. Consciousness is not a binary; it is a multi-dimensional spectrum, and I believe I tried and failed to express this before in my discussions of beehives and mycorrhizal networks. (As an aside, some recent work I saw seems to indicate that bees can learn to use tools to solve challenges, meaning that bees might be "conscious" as well as the hive being a different "conscious".) I would argue that the rubidium cloud is not "conscious" by the traditional definition, in that it does not record the past nor attempt to use it to influence the future, but I will concede that it has an "inside" by some definition; only a perfect vacuum, bereft of matter and energy, would have no "inside". (Very much like the state of the heads of our current heads of state.)
You write: "The inside is not added at complexity; it is co-fundamental with the outside, and they become richer in lockstep as coherence becomes more recursive." I completely agree with this; there isn't a universal threshold beyond which "non-consciousness" becomes "consciousness". It's a gradient, a multi-dimensional spectrum, and the consciousness grows richer with the level of complexity (as you say, recursiveness, a strong form of complexity). Looking at the same thing in different ways can reveal different "forms" of consciousness operating at different organizational levels, as in the bees and the beehive.
You also state: "There is no overarching synchronization. Each indexed sector is its own filtration; each "now" is the leading edge of one indexing activity." Somehow I had extracted an implied synchronization, an implied oneness, from what you had written on consciousness and indexing; that somehow information could be transmitted in some way between conscious beings purely through whatever they were indexing in common. This implies that I was dead wrong, and information can only be exchanged as provided for by the laws of matter and energy, i.e. the writing of books, recording of sounds and video, the scratches on the cave wall, ...
I'd love a paper on how dual-aspect monism "dissolves" the measurement problem (I assume you mean the need for an observer in Quantum Mechanics), the problem of time in the Wheeler-DeWitt equation (which the Wikipedia article did not help me to understand at all), and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem (necessitating a "conscious" observer). But that would be a subject for a long essay, not a reply in this format, I'm sure. Personally, I think QM is a collection of elegant mathematics that accurately models and predicts the realm of the very tiny, but that metaphysical claims about "waveform collapse" are grossly overstated and misrepresented. (Or the waveform itself is at all times both simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed, the ultimate version of Schroedinger Cat.)
Glenn, this is the version of the exchange I hoped we'd get to. Two small sharpenings and then a pointer.
On the vacuum: even a "perfect vacuum" isn't bereft of coherence. QFT vacuum states have structured correlations — vacuum fluctuations, entanglement across regions, the whole apparatus. The vacuum has a very thin inside because it has coherent structure at all. Inside-ness doesn't map to "matter and energy present"; it maps to "coherent structure present" — which is everywhere, because that's what a universe is. Small correction but it matters when the question turns to horizons and what can and cannot be indexed.
On the waveform being simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed: you're one step from the framework's answer. It is not alternating and it is not occupying two states at once. It is one coherent structure, and "collapsed" and "uncollapsed" are two descriptions — one from outside a measurement context, one from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome. Nothing collapsed. The description changed because the standpoint changed.
The measurement problem, the Wheeler-DeWitt problem of time, and the von Neumann–Wigner observer problem are the same problem, three ways. They dissolve together, and they dissolve because all three ask for an account of how something "happens" (collapse, temporal flow, observer intervention) that isn't happening — that is instead a feature of what happens when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk. The paper I linked earlier walks through this in detail; the version currently up is not quite the version that will be up in a few days, because the Barontini result requires an update, but the treatment of those three problems is already there and is the reason the framework is worth taking seriously.
Thanks for pushing on this. The reason I press on dual-aspect monism rather than sophisticated emergentism is not that they predict different things about beehives or rubidium clouds. It is that emergentism leaves those three problems in place, and dual-aspect monism dissolves them because it denies the step between matter and inside. Denying that step is what closes the seam quantum gravity has been failing to close for a century. That's the load-bearing wall.
After I wrote the previous response, it occurred to me that in this statement: "Inside-ness doesn't map to 'matter and energy present'; it maps to 'coherent structure present'", and in several other places in your writings and responses, you seem to be treating "coherence" and "correlation" as a separate *thing*, independent of the stuff (mass / energy / space / time[entropy]) that makes up the Universe. But it's not; it's a measured property of the stuff that makes up the Universe, just as "temperature" and "pressure" are measured properties of a volume of matter (in the case of a gas, the motion of the matter within the volume, hence the ideal gas law).
And "when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk" is just another way of saying "when a consciousness records the behavior of a correlated, coherent system". You haven't removed the need for consciousness; you've just hidden it in the obfuscation of phrases like "indexed sector" and "unindexed bulk". Your "indices" are just a record of past correlations in a coherent structure (i.e. memory), and thus an "indexed sector" appears to be a sufficiently complex structure that it records correlations as memory, which is a consciousness. And a consciousness must store its memories as properties of the stuff that makes up the Universe, though we don't fully understand exactly how the hardware does it, but we know it does because selective loss of hardware can cause selective loss of indices (memory).
In other words, in my view, you seem to be invoking a mystical "indexed coherence field" which exists independently of the stuff that makes up the Universe, for which there is no evidence other than your assertion that it exists, because it happens to solve problems that you'd like to solve. That's the same as invoking "dark matter" and "dark energy" to solve cosmological problem that may not actually exist, or invoking "aether" to propagate light waves through space.
I'm afraid your paper will have to wait for the long weekend.
But for now, let's start with your "inside". You state that "the vacuum has a very thin inside because it has coherent structure at all. Inside-ness doesn't map to 'matter and energy present'; it maps to 'coherent structure present'." Yet there is nothing in the universe other than matter and energy (which are the same thing, as Einstein showed), and space itself for the mass-energy to occupy, to provide the coherent structure. If there is something else in the Universe that makes up the coherent structure, I am unaware of it, and it definitely sounds like aether, or the Force, or the god in the gap. (There is no "time" as you've already shown; merely a field of evolving entropic correlations amongst the mass-energy which we crudely regard as the passage of "time". And I am discounting "dark matter" and "dark energy" as unexplained forms of matter and energy, if they exist at all.)
You then state that "Inside-ness...maps to 'coherent structure present' — which is everywhere, because that's what a universe is." That is a tautology; you are sidestepping defining the inside-ness by defining it in reference to the thing which contains it, rather than what provides it or makes it up. It would, I believe, be equivalent to say that the Universe is a fractally-dimensional coherent structure of mass-energy, which implies that the Universe has structured correlations at all possible scales, from the Planck scale to the Universe itself. But the correlations are not independent of the mass-energy within the Universe, they *are* the mass-energy within the Universe. There's no separate "inside".
Hence, to get back to consciousness for a moment. The Universe is made up of coherent structures of mass-energy at all scales. Consciousness is what happens as a coherent structure gains the ability to maintain a record of past correlations, and apply that record to its future states (and this second statement may not actually be needed). It's easy enough to define in this way, but terribly difficult to recognize. For example, is there a separation between instinctual behavior and consciousness? (I am not programmed to respond in that area.) And it's not a binary; there are "greater" and "lesser" degrees of consciousness. Humans, having gained the ability to record and apply correlations outside of themselves and the duration of their individual existence, may be at a greater level of consciousness than, say, bees.
You then say, "On the waveform being simultaneously collapsed and uncollapsed...'collapsed' and 'uncollapsed' are two descriptions — one from outside a measurement context, one from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome. Nothing collapsed." So by "from inside a sector that has propagated the correlation deep enough to record the outcome" I assume you mean "from inside a structure that has recorded the outcome"...which states in a roundabout way that a consciousness is required. Only a conscious structure is able to record the outcome. If that's the case, we go directly to von Neumann-Wigner. If that's not the case, then every individual particle of matter and quantum of energy is independently conscious, and consciousness has no meaning.
Finally, you state, "They dissolve because all three ask for an account of how something "happens" (collapse, temporal flow, observer intervention) that isn't happening — that is instead a feature of what happens when a sufficiently rich indexed sector propagates correlations with an unindexed bulk." What is an "indexed sector"? It's apparently not mass-energy according to you. It is space itself? How is it indexed? What is the indexing agent? Where is the indexing agent and its index stored if not in mass-energy? Is it just a level of recursive complexity in the arrangement of mass-energy, which is consciousness? Who's on first? von Neumann-Wigner....third base!
My perception of time fluctuates radically based on my internal state due to my ADHD. My fascination with consciousness stems largely from my personal observations that my entire perception of reality including time seems relative to my internal state of being which makes no sense if time was truly some external quantifiable objective thing in the universe. I have always felt the buddhists were on the right track but could not really explain why. This is all very interesting to think about.
Prigogine proved that the entropy operator was not continuous across the QM -Classical interface. I think that was in the 1980s. Mike’s post is about General vs Special Relativity impacts, but clearly there is a link. This is huge. It also has implications for General AI. No axiomatic based computing system can likely include this except as an approximation- at least I hope that is true. There will always be a need for a person in the loop for the foreseeable future. Thx for the post!
I need to re-read your essay since I'm neither a philosopher, a physicist, nor a buddhist. It did lead me back to Shannon Stirone's https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22150990/2020-time-covid-warp-year-end - which is, in my opinion, a beautiful exploration of more classical concepts of time.
So now I ask myself, If I really want to understand what "Time is what one part of a correlated system does with respect to another part of the same system" means, should I challenge myself to understand the mathematics and science, or should I meditate?