Temporal Assembly Theory: Consciousness as Selected History and the Copernican Distribution of Minds

Abstract

Two research programmes have recently made "life" and "selection" into physical observables without settling what, if anything, they imply about mind. Assembly theory quantifies selection through the assembly index and copy number of objects; the diverse-intelligence programme treats cognition as a continuum defined by the spatiotemporal scale of the goals a system can pursue; and Copernican arguments hold that behaviourally sophisticated extraterrestrials should be presumed conscious while engineered mimics should not. This paper proposes Temporal Assembly Theory (TAT), which extends assembly theory from objects in space to the occurrent states of persisting systems in time. A system is conscious, on TAT, to the degree that its present state is a high-assembly object re-assembled by the system's own dynamics from its own previous states and stored target states, and re-instantiated by different means in a copy number that could not occur without selection. Five substrate-neutral quantities are defined (assembly index, endogeneity, temporal copy number, path multiplicity and discovery–production balance), combined into a measure of assembled presence, Ψ, and shown analytically to vanish for feed-forward transducers, frozen loops and noise while remaining positive for target-directed recurrent dynamics. The measure was validated in a pre-registered suite of twelve synthetic systems and a thirteenth held-out system: it vanishes exactly for every excluded class, and endogeneity is recoverable from observed sequences alone within the string world. The assembly horizon of the present state quantifies the cognitive light cone; the co-assembly space individuates subjects; endogeneity gives the mimicry argument a constitutive basis while leaving Swampman conscious. A Ψ-form of the Drake equation is derived, and it is argued that the probability of assembled presence given complex mobile life is close to unity, so that conscious systems vastly outnumber technological species: consciousness is an early consequence of selection turning inward, not a late hard step. Ten predictions are stated, including falsifiers, together with "cognosignatures" for astrobiology and an engineering test for artificial systems.