Theory of Time and Consciousness: Conceptual Framework and Ontological Grounding

Abstract

THEORY OF TIME AND CONSCIOUSNESS (Abstract of an Interdisciplinary Theory) Authors: Azhar Donenbayeva Dossayev Assan Mazhitov Mikhail Target Audience: Broad interdisciplinary community of consciousness researchers and complex adaptive systems: philosophers of mind, theoretical and applied mathematicians, physicists, cyberneticists, artificial intelligence and machine learning specialists, neuro- and systems biologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, geneticists, evolutionary biologists, clinical neurologists, as well as scientists working with open thermodynamic and information systems. Objective: To provide a compact, self-contained exposition of the theory that allows assessing its novelty, logical coherence, empirical testability, and practical value. Executive Summary The Theory of Time and Consciousness shows that consciousness is material but not reducible to matter or energy; it is linked to them through information.Information, within this framework, is understood as the property of matter to be organized.Consciousness is the property of living matter to organize information about its own structure. In the course of the evolution of this property, excess informational complexity is externalized in the form of collective experience and knowledge (at the human level). Human consciousness is a species-specific form of the consciousness of living matter, determined by the genetically specified architecture of the human organism. Human consciousness consists in its ability to organize its own consciousness (i.e., the consciousness inherent in animals and preceding stages of human evolution and realized in brain structures) through the integration of the collective experience of our species into knowledge and returning it into its own consciousness via a feedback loop implemented bodily in the form of experiences. Experiences serve as positive and negative feedback between the flows of knowledge and consciousness. The genetically specified architecture and social environment are necessary conditions for the formation of the human form of consciousness; however, basic consciousness as a property of living matter is inherent in humans from the moment of conception. The human form of consciousness, as the ability to organize one's own consciousness through collective experience, may be impaired, lost, or not formed due to physiological disturbances or the absence of an appropriate environment, while more fundamental levels of consciousness, characteristic of animals and protozoa, may persist. The Principle of Time. Time is the main resource for the evolution of consciousness of living matter. Each new level of organization arises when the system gains additional time between an environmental signal and its own reaction for information processing.The more time the system gains for information processing, the more complex its regulatory circuits become and the more degrees of freedom it acquires. It is precisely this gain in time that compensates for the cost of organizational complexity: the additional expenditure of resources to maintain a more complex system is offset by increased regulatory precision, a broader range of possible reactions, and an increased probability of system preservation. Knowledge allows humans to save time by using information accumulated over millennia about possible outcomes instead of repeatedly enumerating options. This reduces the time between signal and response and makes consciousness evolutionarily advantageous without increasing biological complexity. Conversely, humans have lost many physical qualities that even primates possess – muscle mass, speed, visual and auditory acuity, resistance to external conditions, etc. But this loss is compensated by technologies, which are materialized knowledge externalized. Technologies are not merely “tools” but external contours of information organization that enable humans to act in the environment with efficiency unavailable to their bodies. Thus, the evolution of human consciousness is not a path to biological perfection, but a transition to a new survival strategy: instead of complicating the body, the system began to complicate ways of organizing information and externalize them. This is precisely why humans have maintained biological stability for millennia while radically changing their habitat and ways of interacting with it. Artificial intelligence, in this logic, appears as a result of the entropy of collective knowledge. The information accumulated by humanity has reached such volume and complexity that the individual brain and even culture can no longer retain and process it in the previous mode. A new fluctuation emerges – distributed information processing systems that are not living in the biological sense but inherit the principle of organizing flows. This can be seen as a harbinger of the next bifurcation transition, where consciousness as a property of information organization may shift to a new level – no longer within a single organism, but in a distributed “human – knowledge – technology” system. However, human consciousness is not the final form of consciousness. Evolution is not linear progress but a cascade of bifurcations. Upon reaching critical complexity, the system may follow one of four paths: maintain the previous regime (containment), make a qualitative leap to a new attractor, enter a state of chaotic flickering, or collapse. Further evolution of human consciousness is one of the possible outcomes, but not the only one and not obligatory. Thus, the Theory of Time and Consciousness shows that consciousness is material and explainable, but it is neither matter, nor energy, nor an epiphenomenon. It is not a by-product of the brain, but an evolutionary response to the challenge of uncertainty – a way for living matter to maintain dynamic disequilibrium through the organization of information about its own structure. Human consciousness is one of the forms of this response, arising from genetic architecture, the ability to externalize complexity, process it collectively, and return processed knowledge into its own consciousness, closing the feedback loop through experiences. Such a mechanism is not found in any animal.Human consciousness is evolutionarily justified because it allows living systems to reduce the time of adaptation from the scale of individual life to the scale of historical accumulation: information is transmitted compactly in the form of knowledge, rather than through direct sensory experience. However, human consciousness is not the final form. The accumulation of collective knowledge generates new entropy, and the next transition already looms on the horizon – in the form of artificial intelligence and distributed cognitive systems. The Theory of Time and Consciousness does not predict it, but provides a framework within which it can be meaningfully observed and, perhaps, guided. The proposed approach explains the phenomenon of human consciousness by the laws of natural sciences, linking consciousness with information, matter, energy, and time, eliminating ontological paradoxes, including the “hard problem” (qualia, subjective experience), without introducing a new ontology. Thereby, the problem of the uniqueness of human consciousness, the problem of other minds, the multiplicity of forms of consciousness, and anthropocentrism in consciousness research are resolved. This preprint is a brief justification of this framework and its connection to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, non‑equilibrium thermodynamics, and information theory. We show that consciousness is not an exception in the physical world, but its natural consequence at a certain level of organization of living matter, and that the Theory of Time and Consciousness allows tracing its connection with the organization of matter and energy in their continuity – from basic physicochemical processes to the evolution and function of human consciousness. The first preprint of the Theory of Time and Consciousness (Preprint 2025: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17748001) contains a detailed description of bifurcation transitions, the hierarchy of feedback loops, ontogenetic stages of gain‑control tuning, and the mathematical structure of the model. The present preprint supplements it by proposing an ontological framework that clarifies the definition of consciousness of living matter and human consciousness as one of the particular cases of the property of living matter to organize information about its own structure, and also introduces the boundaries of the Theory of Time and Consciousness. The two preprints complement each other: the first provides the evolutionary‑biological and mathematical foundation, the second – the conceptual core and philosophical‑methodological generalization necessary for interdisciplinary dialogue. Part 1. Brief Overview of the Main Propositions of the Theory of Time and Consciousness Information is the property of matter, as a closed system in dynamic equilibrium with the environment, to be organized. Upon interaction with the environment, information is overwritten, passing from one organization of matter to another, with the release of energy. Information does not exist separately from its carrier and manifests in its structure. Living matter maintains dynamic disequilibrium despite continuous exchange of energy, matter, and information with the external environment. Consciousness is the property of living matter to organize information about its own structure in order to ensure a constant influx of free energy and matter and the removal of excess entropy into the external environment. This property is a necessary condition for distinguishing beneficial and harmful interactions: without it, the system loses its ability to select incoming flows and, consequently, to maintain its own stability. The general principle of the operation of consciousness of living matter is pre