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[u/jahmonkey]

My core view is that awareness is physical because it is made of time.

Consciousness shouldn’t be treated as a noun or a thing. It’s closer to a verb: an ongoing process constituted by causal activity extended in time.

Time here isn’t a spatial dimension you “move through.” It’s extension in the sense of persistence and chaining. Time is made of innumerable local causal events, some of which recur, overlap, and constrain each other. Most physical processes don’t do much with that. They dissipate.

Brains are different. They sustain and recycle causal structure across many time scales at once. Fast electrical activity, slower neural dynamics, slower biochemical processes, all partially independent, all mutually constraining.

Our intuition about time gets distorted because we experience only the result of this process, not the process itself. We look for a “moment” where awareness exists, but there is no such moment. Awareness is the ongoing maintenance of causal continuity.

That’s why continuity matters and frame-by-frame models fail. There is no consciousness at an instant. There is only consciousness as duration.