Welcome!
The Theory of Time and Consciousness offers a coherent solution to one of the most difficult problems in modern science — the nature of consciousness and the question of its ontological status (is consciousness material or not?).
In our theory, human consciousness is the process of interaction between neural ensembles and the feedback loops of the “body–brain” system. Within this process, a core neural ensemble of personality emerges as the binding link with the underlying level of organization — the body–brain system. At the level of feedback loops, consciousness acts as a meta-superposition over all nested circuits — from bodily and sensorimotor to neural, symbolic, and social — integrating them into a unified configuration of “I-in-the-world” and dynamically redistributing gain control among them.
In the proposed model, neural ensembles — which serve as stable systems for representing objects (including the self) — can be understood as a meta-superposition relative to the brain itself: they integrate and reorganize neural processes. It is precisely the process of gain control between these ensembles and their nested circuits that we subjectively experience as consciousness.
The brain, in turn, acts as a superposition relative to the body: it integrates and reorganizes the body’s physicochemical processes. Gain control from brain to body is achieved through the interaction of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters possess both chemical and electrical properties simultaneously, allowing them to regulate the brain as a system of potentials and the body as matter. In other words, neurotransmitter circuits “collect” information from the body into the brain, interact with each other, and send integrated decisions back to the body — without needing to “check” every individual rule at the periphery.
The personality ensures the preservation and actualization of memory about internal states and external objects, and enables the encoding and maintenance of causal relationships between objects and events (how the world affects me — how I affect the world).
Personality also has dual properties. On one hand, it is formed by the brain as an object — according to the same principles by which memory of objects is formed in animals. On the other hand, once fixed as a stable neural ensemble, personality makes it possible to treat ensembles themselves as objects, thereby connecting different levels of organization — from bodily states to symbolic and social structures.
Ontogenesis defines a genetically pre-tuned sequence for the formation of this configuration: the step-by-step unfolding and fine-tuning of feedback loops at all levels through interaction with the body, the environment, and other people.
Taken together, consciousness is the highest known form of information organization in time — operating at the maximum horizon of uncertainty reduction available to the organism. From this perspective, the human psyche is a systemic property of highly organized matter — neural ensembles — that enables the reflection of objective reality and the regulation of human behavior and activity through consciousness as the process of their interaction, which itself functions as a meta-superposition relative to the brain.

We argue that in this model:
- consciousness and personality naturally emerge from the evolution of bodily and neural feedback loops, without any recourse to immaterial entities;
- the question of the “materiality” of the psyche is resolved: it is localizable and in principle measurable in neural ensembles, neurotransmitter regimes, and feedback patterns;
- psychopathologies, character traits, trauma, and development can all be described in a unified language of regulatory levels and gain-control modes, instead of as disconnected “symptoms” and diagnostic checklists.

The core of the theory is already sufficiently developed to serve as a working framework for research in neuroscience, psychiatry, psychotherapy, somatic medicine, and cognitive science.

We are publishing it openly because we believe the next step is not to invent “yet another concept,” but to calibrate the parameters of this model, develop quantitative metrics, and test its predictions against clinical, experimental, and computational data.

We need specialists from related fields — neurobiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers — to expand this already established framework into full-fledged research protocols and practical applications. We are confident that the chosen direction is correct; now the task is collective work to refine the details.

The theory provides a framework that:
- is fully compatible with data from evolutionary biology, neuroscience, developmental psychology, and psychopathology;
- supplies a common language for describing both normal functioning and breakdowns (character traits, trauma, mental disorders) in terms of levels of feedback loops and gain-control regimes;
- generates testable hypotheses — from ontogenetic parameters to potential biomarkers and metrics of mental-state dynamics.

Brief Overview of the Theory of Time and Consciousness (TTC)
The Theory of Time and Consciousness (TTC) is a scientific hypothesis that integrates biology, evolution, neuroscience, phenomenology, and Ilya Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamics. It focuses on feedback loops as the core mechanism driving the evolution of information flows from inanimate matter to human consciousness. TTC resolves the “hard problem of consciousness” (qualia and phenomenal experience) through a purely process-based approach. The theory asserts that consciousness is not an abstract entity but an emergent outcome of multi-level interactions in which time, information, and energetic efficiency play the central role.

TTC is presented as a verifiable and falsifiable hypothesis, open to criticism, with breakthrough potential for psychology, medicine, ethics, and artificial intelligence.

• Key Goals and RelevanceThe problem of consciousness Current approaches (neuroscientific, philosophical, quantum, etc.) successfully explain particular functions (attention, memory, behaviour) but fail to account for why subjective experience (qualia) arises at all. TTC solves this by treating consciousness as an evolutionary tool for stabilisation in far-from-equilibrium systems.
• Relevance today Deep understanding of consciousness is crucial for clinical diagnosis (coma, minimally conscious states, autism), ethics (animal and AI consciousness), psychiatry and neurology (mental disorders), and future technology (genuinely conscious AI).
• Methodological foundation The theory builds on Ilya Prigogine’s non-equilibrium thermodynamics (dissipative structures, bifurcations, feedback loops). Consciousness emerges from fluctuations that are sustained by continual energy/information exchange. It integrates ideas from Karl Friston’s free-energy principle and active inference, but extends them to genuinely multi-level feedback loops: genetic → bodily → neural → symbolic → social → ecological.

Core ConceptsThe theory describes the evolution from simple systems to consciousness as a sequence of bifurcation transitions — points at which a system increases its complexity in order to remain stable far from thermodynamic equilibrium. The central mechanism throughout is feedback loops that provide self-regulation. These loops evolve hierarchically across levels.

1. Single-celled organisms Cells stabilize themselves by triggering their own chemical reactions (RNA, kinesis, taxis) in response to environmental gradients. The emergence of RNA → DNA + cell membrane creates the first closed self-replication loop. Behaviour is governed by primitive taxes (chemo-, photo-, thermo-, etc.): the organism moves toward the beneficial or away from the harmful along a gradient. The earliest form of “memory” appears — the stored nucleotide sequence.
2. The emergence of the nervous system With the appearance of neural networks comes tissue and organ specialization, allowing animals to recognize the consequences of environmental impacts through multimodal cues (light, sound, vibration, smell). However, specialization introduces synaptic delay. To compensate, the neural network stores memories of past reactions and begins to predict them in advance.

Because behaviour is now triggered by the network’s own prediction, the network evaluates the outcome after the action is completed. This outcome becomes new input, thereby closing genuine neural feedback loops. Pain and pleasure arise as evolutionary mechanisms for regulating prediction-based behaviour.
Internal and external signals are translated by the neural network into a single language of action potentials. Qualia (phenomenal experience) emerge as a necessary means of binding multimodal and temporally dispersed signals from the environment and the body into a single coherent stream. Neurotransmitters serve as the universal “translator” between chemical processes and electrical potentials for neural computation, and then back into chemical reactions in the body. In this way, the neural network establishes gain control over cellular processes.
This framework allows the Theory of Time and Consciousness to answer why qualia and phenomenal experience evolved, and to show that they are a necessary but not sufficient condition for human-like consciousness. Millions of animal species possess phenomenal experience yet lack consciousness in the human sense.
TTC also demonstrates that known laws of chemistry and physics are fully sufficient for the emergence of qualia — no additional principles are required.
Within the nervous system, three major bifurcation transitions occur, successively closing the dolimbic sensorimotor, limbic, and neocortical feedback loops — yet the underlying thermodynamic principle remains the same at every level. All incoming signals are compared against experience accumulated during ontogeny (i.e., memory). The network predicts future states of the organism, alters its own neurochemistry to initiate movement at the cellular level, and registers the outcome of the predictive action as prediction error or success, thereby adjusting the thresholds of innate programs.

Evolution of the Neural Network (3 Stages)

1) Dolimbic (sensorimotor) feedback loop
In most animals, behaviour is governed by instincts — rigid, genetically fixed action patterns. Each instinct unfolds in five stages:
- A key stimulus captures attention.
- If the stimulus repeats, the signal is amplified, competing signals are suppressed, and the motor system is primed.
- Once the accumulated neurotransmitter level crosses a threshold, the innate program (attack, flight, mating, etc.) is released.
- The program stops when the stimulus disappears, ATP is depleted, or the goal is achieved.
- Afterward, the network temporarily down-regulates all signals (largely via serotonin).

A successful outcome is tagged with dopamine → next time the same program triggers faster and at a lower threshold. A negative outcome is tagged with cortisol raises the threshold.

In many species, part of neural development is shifted to postnatal ontogeny. Because the newborn is motorically helpless, the network accumulates memory of which motor programs worked in which context. Reproductive programs, parental care, migration, etc. operate on the same principle, only with much longer neurotransmitter accumulation times and program durations.
Everything else in the animal’s life runs essentially on working memory, similar to single-celled organisms.

2) Limbic feedback loop (mammals)
In mammals, the limbic loop closes with the maturation of the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. Behaviour is now controlled by emotions.
Emotions arise because postnatal ontogeny is dramatically prolonged and the young are protected by a caregiver. During this period, limbic structures — which are already highly plastic — tune the triggering thresholds of instinctual programs through repeated experience.

Thus, the limbic system establishes gain control over instincts. TTC therefore defines emotions not as simple valence (good–bad), but as memory of the neurotransmitter dynamics that accompanied past executions of instinctual programs. This makes animal behaviour computationally tractable: the network remembers sequences of neurotransmitter release and can later treat dopamine release itself as a prediction of future benefit.

3) Neocortical feedback loop (higher mammals and primates)
In higher animals, the neocortex closes a new loop by applying gain control to emotions themselves. Offspring are born even more immature and completely dependent on the mother. The only persistent object in the infant’s world — the caregiver — becomes the template for object permanence. Stable neural ensembles emerge that can hold the image of an object even when it is out of sight.

Memory of objects becomes an independent source of information about the world. This gives rise to feelings — essentially accumulated statistics of interactions with specific objects. Rigid dominance hierarchies in animal groups become flexible and context-dependent.

At this point, the evolution of the “body–brain” system in higher animals essentially reaches its limit. Further progress is no longer about adding more sensorimotor circuits, but about the ability to store and manipulate causal relationships. We already see rudimentary manifestations of this in some animals.

For causal relationships to become an independent data type (i.e., objects of internal representation rather than a side effect of learning), three conditions must be met:

1. A neurotransmitter “rule” of gain control that can regulate and stabilize the attractors of the previous level (instincts → emotions → feelings).
2. The new feedback loop must be able to test its own predictions (compare expected vs. actual outcomes and correct the internal model based on prediction error).
3. A mechanism that limits the combinatorial explosion of possible causes and effects — otherwise the system drowns in irrelevant possibilities and cannot extract meaningful causal chains.

The Emergence of Personality and Consciousness in the Homo sapiens Lineage

3.For these reasons, the Theory of Time and Consciousness (TTC) claims that the final Prigogine-type attractor — the one that pushes excess entropy outward in the form of explicit knowledge — arose only in the Homo sapiens lineage.
This is why consciousness cannot be “found” somewhere inside the brain: a genuine neurosomatic reconfiguration took place. The neural ensembles that, in higher animals, merely represented persistent objects now became independent, self-standing pieces of information about the world and the internal state. They began to encode and store causal relationships between objects and events.
For the highest feedback loop to close, it had to assume gain-control over all lower loops: not simply react to their outputs, but actively regulate their sensitivity, thresholds, and priorities. In practice, this means the emergence of higher-order meta-rules that decide when and by how much to amplify or suppress instincts, emotions, and feelings, and which causal hypotheses are relevant in the current context.
Thus, during human ontogeny, an entirely new object is formed — the object of the self, the personality. This personality makes it possible to encode information about how objects influence one another. Neural ensembles no longer merely remember objects and situations (as in animals); they now remember how one object affects another.
Just as, at the previous bifurcation, neurotransmitters became the universal translation layer between neural computation and body chemistry, the human personality becomes an autonomous object and a bridge between the “body–brain” system and the external world.
Therefore, consciousness is the ongoing process of gain-control exercised by the personality ensemble (the stable internal representation of the self) over instincts, emotions, and feelings — that is, over the entire previous-level “body–brain” system.
Upright posture, the narrow female pelvis, birth of a highly plastic, immature brain, partial decoupling of breathing and motor patterns from rigid cortical control — all these factors gave the human neocortex direct access to the body and the ability to alter neural computations by deliberately changing bodily states. This is how volition appeared: the capacity to initiate movement on the basis of thought alone.
Thought, in turn, gives humans the ability to treat causal relationships as independent, manipulable units of information.
It is precisely this transfer of gain-control to higher-order neural ensembles that we experience as human consciousness. All lower levels continue to operate within us, but now the highest loop can observe, analyse, suppress, amplify, and reorganise them into long causal chains.
This is the decisive bifurcation that separates Homo sapiens from all other species: the birth of a meta-superposition — the personality — that treats the entire “body–brain” system as its subordinate object and turns causal models themselves into objects of manipulation.

Conclusion: The Theory of Time and Consciousness (TTC)

The Theory of Time and Consciousness offers a fully materialist and evolutionary explanation of consciousness as the inevitable outcome of progressive complexification of feedback loops in far-from-equilibrium systems: from cellular circuits → neural circuits → the highest level, where causal representations and the personality (the self as an object) finally emerge.
Key points:

• Through successive bifurcation transitions (points at which the system increases complexity to remain stable), the theory describes the evolution of global feedback loops: genetic (DNA self-replication), bodily (homeostasis), social/group, and ecological. These loops maximise energetic efficiency, making consciousness not an accident but a law-like consequence of long-term entropy minimisation.
• Qualia and phenomenal experience are treated as functional necessities: a unified stream required to bind multimodal and temporally scattered signals into a coherent whole.
• Full human consciousness arises only when the highest feedback loop gains gain-control over instincts, emotions, and feelings via higher-order meta-rules and self-observation — which necessarily requires the formation of a stable personality ensemble.
• The theory foregrounds time and information as flows: consciousness emerges from non-equilibrium processes, progressing from “level zero” loops (stabilisation without a subject in inanimate matter) to the human level, where causal relationships become autonomous data objects capable of reducing uncertainty over evolutionary and individual lifetimes.
• No new ontology is introduced: TTC rests entirely on established laws of biology, neuroscience, and non-equilibrium thermodynamics (dissipative structures, stability, and bifurcations).
• TTC provides a formalisable and testable framework with concrete predictions about the relationships among neurotransmitter gain-control, prediction error, temporal depth, and agency.

As a scientific hypothesis, TTC is deliberately open to empirical testing (via neuroimaging, bifurcation modelling, clinical data, etc.) and invites broad interdisciplinary collaboration — potentially comparable in impact to the discovery of the genome for our understanding of mind, psychiatry, ethics, and artificial intelligence.
Practical potential includes:

• Revolutionary approaches in medicine and psychiatry (general anaesthesia, coma, disorders of agency, psychosis);
• New foundations for clinical psychology and psychotherapy;
• Rigorous criteria for consciousness in animals and future AI systems;
• Principled design strategies for truly agentive and self-aware artificial intelligence.

We welcome researchers, clinicians, philosophers, and engineers to test, refine, and extend the theory.
The next step is no longer theoretical speculation — it is joint empirical calibration of the model and translation into real-world applications.

Authors:
Donenbayeva Azhar Bekbolatovna
Dossayev Assan Yeralhanovich
Mazhitov Mikhail Ilyubaevich
Astana, Republic of Kazakhstan, 2025

English Introductory Page Theory of Time and Consciousness (TTC)

This page offers a concise overview of the theory in English (approximately 15–20 minutes reading time).
The complete version of the theory (over 600 pages of text, diagrams, mathematical models and calculations) is currently available only in Russian. If you would like to receive the full Russian-language materials right now, please contact us via the Telegram channel or email — we will be happy to share everything with you immediately.
On the Russian-language website you will also find 20 introductory video lectures on the theory.
During 2025–2026 we plan to fully translate the entire theory, including all appendices and computational models, into English and make them freely available.
Thank you for your interest in our work!