Time solved, the sequel

Two criticisms

Ambitious, the previous article? After showing how thorny the problem of time is, it claims to solve it in a few paragraphs. Philosophical references but no equations. How can science and phenomenon converge under these conditions? This is the first criticism to be made of this article.

The second criticism is that it is very nice to appeal to the complex dimension rather than to a reductive mathematics, this does not explain the time experienced as a phenomenon. How does the tiering of materialist models manage to bridge the gap between measurement and experience of time?

Theory without model

The first criticism is ontological. It demands that the explanation be a new, more satisfying model of time. But my theory is based on Surimposium which is a meta-concept of reality. It does not create any particular model. It integrates existing ones, especially ontological, without questioning them. The better it grants them true independence: two models can be seemingly contradictory when it comes to two different levels of complexity. General relativity and quantum mechanics are no longer incompatible but located in separate frameworks. No universal framework, only a single meta-principle linking existing frameworks. It is possible that current math is too specialized to translate this meta-principle.

Surimposium is 800 pages long and I can’t summarize it in every article. The dedicated page allows agile minds to grasp the principle. This book extends the current tendency of science to validate the notion of emergence, thus to recognize this relative independence of systems. It is part of the thread of current research and is not idealistic in essence. The idealist vision “Everything comes from consciousness (including time)” is included without this causal direction being privileged, which gives: “The higher retrocontrol comes from consciousness (including that of time)”.

At the top of a skyscraper

To the second criticism I answer that the phenomenon ‘time’ does not appear only because a mental scene occurs on top of neural excitations, i.e. one level of complexity overlapping the other. We must understand the incredible staging that neural networks manufacture. When Integrated Information Theory speaks of complex depth, let us forget the image of the black box, which only reflects our powerlessness to understand the process in detail, and think of a skyscraper of neural analysis floors that transmit their results to each other, while remaining a medium for this transmitted information—it loses its meaning if it does not remain integrated into all these floors.

Each floor observes the state of the previous one, is somehow aware of its constitution. This reversal of one floor on the previous one is a thin layer of consciousness that is added to the previous ones. Each floor establishes its particular time of interaction to produce its result, it experiences this passage from one event to another in its own way. As integration increases, the proven time gets longer, because this integration is slower to move from one state to another.

A passage between two times

The time of consciousness is a slow time tested compared to the faster times of its constituents —that of all the mental functions involved. The respective share of functions varies and explains the deviations of conscious content such as those of the proven fusion time. Indeed, an experience of the passage of time, fast or slow, can only exist compared to another speed of passage. The brain does not have its eyes permanently glued to the watch. There is also no ‘internal stopwatch’ that would sound regularly the seconds. The experience of passage is the integration of the clocks of mental functions, observed by conscious space. It is in this observation that it is no longer constitution but phenomenon.

This reversal takes place not only in conscious space but at every stage of neural complexity. Thus the final experience includes all the experiences of the underlying floors, from their physical constitution. There is a particle time in our proven time, but it is drowned under the impressive height of complexity that separates it from consciousness, and its atomic regularity is not perceptible to us, under the fantasy of neural organizations.

The passage of time, another dimension

Why consider this theory? It does not contradict any of the existing physical and neuroscientific models, resolves all the contradictions that the phenomenological approach can elevate. For this it is enough to elevate the complex dimension to the status of fundamental dimension of the experience of phenomena. The result, you are experiencing it: depending on whether this article has borrowed usual or innovative neural paths at home, time will have passed more or less quickly in your consciousness.

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