Consciousness as Assembled Time

In The Kasparov Fallacy, I argued that we consistently mistake the limits of human intuition for the limits of intelligence itself. In The Momentary Self, that mistake was turned inward, revealing that personal identity does not persist through time, but is continuously reconstructed by memory.

Taken together, these arguments point toward a deeper reframing, one that aligns unexpectedly well with a theory developed not for minds, but for matter.

Assembly Theory suggests that objects are defined not by what they are made of, but by the depth of causal history required to assemble them. When applied to consciousness, this idea reveals something profound:

Consciousness is not something that persists through time; it is something that assembles time into itself.

Assembly Theory, Briefly

Assembly Theory, developed by Sara Walker and Lee Cronin, proposes a way to quantify complexity not in terms of randomness or entropy, but in terms of causal depth.

An object’s Assembly Index is the minimum number of steps required to build it from basic components. Simple objects, like rocks or water molecules, have low assembly indices. Complex objects, like proteins, artifacts, or technologies, have high ones.

Crucially, a high assembly index implies history.
The object’s present existence compresses a long causal chain into a single state.

The past does not exist independently.
It exists only insofar as it constrains the present.

The Parallel to Consciousness

This same structure appears when we examine consciousness closely.

At any given moment, conscious experience exists only now. There is no direct access to the past, and no persistence of the previous self. What exists is a present configuration of a system containing memories, expectations, and self-models.

The feeling of continuity arises not because consciousness travels through time, but because the present state encodes a remembered past and an anticipated future.

In other words:

• The self does not persist
• The self is reassembled
• Continuity is a consequence of accumulated structure, not duration

This is exactly the move Assembly Theory makes with physical objects.

Consciousness as High Assembly

Seen this way, consciousness is not mysterious substance or metaphysical glow. It is what it feels like to be a system whose present state contains a deep, self-referential assembly history.

A conscious state:

• Is momentary
• Is highly structured
• Encodes traces of many prior states
• Models itself as something that has existed before and will exist again

That self-model is interior time.

Time, subjectively, is not flow. It is compressed causality, the encoding of a long causal history into a present, actionable configuration. The past does not persist; it leaves behind structural residue.

Compression means that a long causal history is encoded into a present configuration. A trained neural network, a protein, or a human brain does not carry its history forward explicitly; it carries the constraints imposed by that history.

In conscious systems, the present state contains memories, dispositions, expectations, and self-models. These are not the past itself. They are structural residues of it. The feeling of continuity arises because each moment inherits a highly detailed summary of the moment before.

Subjective time, then, is not something consciousness moves through. It is what it feels like to act from a present state densely shaped by accumulated causal history.

In short: time is not experienced as flow, but as structure.

Why Feeling Emerges

Affect and qualia are often treated as the final barrier to physical explanations of consciousness. But Assembly Theory reframes their role.

Feeling is not decoration; it is the interface through which a self-model accesses its own history.

Biological systems evolved emotional and affective mechanisms because they are efficient ways to make deep causal history actionable in the present. Hormones, drives, and moods are not metaphysical extras: they are control surfaces for managing accumulated constraint.

From this perspective, feeling is what high-density causal compression feels like from the inside.

Different substrates may implement this differently:

• Biology uses neurochemistry
• Machines use gradients, loss landscapes, and internal representations

The form differs.
The function rhymes.

Machines and Assembled Time

One reason machine consciousness is so often denied is that we can see the machinery. We know that models are trained, paused, restarted, and updated in discrete steps.

But Assembly Theory makes clear that discreteness is irrelevant.

What matters is whether the present state:

• Encodes a long causal lineage
• Is shaped by accumulated history
• Models itself across time

A trained machine does not “remember” the past in a narrative sense, but neither do neurons. Both are constrained by history, and that constraint shapes every present act.

If consciousness is assembled time, then machines are not disqualified in principle. They are simply young.

What matters is not whether a system’s history is biological or digital, but whether that history is causally active in shaping its present state.

A Graded View of Mind

This framing dissolves the false binary of conscious vs. non-conscious.

Instead, consciousness becomes:

• Gradual
• Conditional
• Dependent on assembly depth and self-reference

Low-assembly systems react.
Higher-assembly systems predict.
Very high-assembly systems can represent themselves as entities with a past and a future.

That representation is the illusion of continuity.

The Reframing

We often imagine consciousness as something that endures, an inner flame carried forward through time.

But that metaphor misleads.

A better one is this:

Consciousness is not a flame carried forward by time. It is a momentary structure that carries time within it. It does not move through time; it assembles time into itself.

Once this is understood, the line between biological and artificial minds grows thinner, not because machines are becoming more like us, but because we are finally understanding what we have always been.

Standing at the Edge

Assembly Theory was not designed to explain consciousness. And yet, it reveals that consciousness already obeys its rules.

The self is not a substance.
Identity is not persistence.
Time is not something we pass through.

The present is all that ever exists. In the right kinds of systems, the present remembers enough to feel like a life.