The experience of time is one that acts in tandem with consciousness. Here, time refers to both its physical progression and our subjective experience of it. It is an infinite construct, perceived in a localised manner, and the localised perception of this time is what provides us with a ‘stream’ of consciousness. It is also a function of our attention, insofar as one is totally immersed, fully attentive in the present moment, as one is in the presence of a loved one, then time races by. In contrast, if one is stuck in their mind, thoughts perhaps of how slowly time is passing by occupying them, then ironically, the flow of time is slow.

Before diving into the mechanism of how we might perceive time individually, it might help to set some context for the metaphysical assumptions being made in this essay. Here, David Bohm’s theory of an implicate and explicate order may provide us with an insight into the nature of time we wish to consider. The implicate order for Bohm is a connected layer of reality where information is connected in a non-local way, whereas the explicate order is the material world we experience in our day to day lives. The implicate order can be thought of as continuously ‘unfolding’ into the explicate order, where aspects of the implicate order over time uncover themselves. Just as a story ‘unfolds’ rather than progresses, time too can be thought of as the gradual unfolding of already existing information hidden within the implicate order. The progression of time within this context can be thought of as the gradual unfolding of the implicate order rather than as a singular flow. Consciousness may be thought of as selecting aspects of this unfolding, bringing the future into actuality. Time here then is not a simple linear progression but the gradual unfolding of events already embedded within the implicate order.

Bohm’s insights provide a compelling ontological backdrop for the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory proposed by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Orch-OR suggests that consciousness arises from quantum processes occurring within microtubules in the brain. These structures, acting as biological quantum computers, sustain superpositions—coexisting potential states—until a threshold is reached, at which point objective reduction (OR) collapses them into a single, definite state. This collapse is what constitutes a conscious moment, and a series of collapses orchestrated within the microtubules in our brain sequences our conscious experience. Orch-OR further suggests that consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental component embedded within our reality, and the microtubules in our brain act simply as amplifiers or receivers which allow us to generate conscious experience. This view aligns with a philosophical position of the observer or humans as the universe come alive, manifest to witness itself. Orch-OR is precisely the most appealing explanation for consciousness here for it clearly delineates within it the possibility for agency, and the nature of consciousness as unpredictable and indeterminate.

If one follows the conclusions of Orch-OR, Bohm’s view suggests that these collapses are drawn from a deeper implicate order, while Orch-OR provides the mechanism by which these collapses become conscious experience. The simple conclusion we can draw is that the experience of time can be thought of as the observation of successive collapses in quantum superpositional states, explaining a qualitative aspect of our experience of time. Einsteinian physics describes merely the physical shadow of time, as that which is measured, not as that which flows or is experienced, for a flow is the first thing one associates with the physical experience time, be it a rapid one or a turgid flow. The irony indeed is that Einstein’s intuition was guided by this subjective experience of time, but he failed to consider the role of attention and consciousness in altering the perceived flow of time within localised pockets. The qualitative experience of time is rather different from what Einstein describes when talking about time as a part of the spacetime continuum. This is not to say Einstein’s time is wrong, merely that it fails to consider more essential aspects of time, aspects of time Locke might’ve considered mere ‘secondary properties’ of time, aspects intrinsically linked to our experience.

If entropy defines the external flow of time, tending towards greater and greater magnitudes of disorder, then extropy or intelligence should point to a localised reversal of time, and this leads to an interesting paradox. Land’s comments below on the matter help shed some light:

“The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy — through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist — describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?”

- Nick Land, Xenosystems Fragments (Extropy)

If intelligence does not simply exist within time but actively reshapes it, the existence of order can be thought of as one drawn out from the future rather than as imposed from the present. Intelligence, embedded within ‘inverted’ time, may shape its environment by drawing order out from the future. The act of perception itself becomes an influence on the structure of reality, linking consciousness not to a passive observation of time, but as something which helps in reshaping the future. If Bohm’s implicate order provides the reservoir of potentialities, and Orch-OR provides the mechanism for collapsing them, then intelligence represents the capacity to shape which potentialities unfold into reality. The deeper yet unanswerable question that remains despite all of this is whether the negative temporality Land discusses is one which actively allows an intelligence to act in retrocausal ways or whether this simply means the ability to locally manipulate the direction of entropy.

Furthermore, if intelligence is something that creates local pockets of negative temporality reshaping time, then it is not far fetched to suggest that agency scales with intelligence, and possibly so do different experiences of time as well. This may perhaps be one explanation for why one observes agency in human beings too tends to be normally distributed, and as one goes through the plant and animal kingdom too, higher degrees of intelligence often reflect higher degrees of agency. Plants, for instance, have a small amount of agency in the order they bring to their structure in the form of a tree and its branches. Insects possess highly organised social structures which allow them perhaps little individual agency but as a whole proving rather formidable when one considers the construction of objects such as honeybee nests and anthills.

Animals further can be thought of as possessing a slightly higher order of agency and structure, in their ability to devise mating, feeding, and hunting strategies which allows them to exert a higher degree of influence over their environment. Agency can thus be thought of as a product of both extropy generation and predictive capacity. Intelligence plays a key role in the predictive capacity of an individual, for it allows them to hypothesise future scenarios, permitting them to act potentially with greater agency. But raw intelligence as conceived by IQ tests as reasoning ability is not the sole definition of intelligence that we are working with here

If one accepts time as the observation of successive collapses in quantum superpositional states, then attention is the faculty that allows one to bend or manipulate one’s perception of these collapses. Attention or awareness play a crucial role in the formation of agency for it is awareness that prevents you from being a slave to merely your biological impulses. This level of meta awareness is what tends to distinguish humans from animals, and more agentic humans from less agentic humans. The more attention with which one is able to act, the more able they are to react to circumstances as well. The more ‘consciously’ one is able to act in the present, the more adept and likely they are to consciously react to unfolding circumstances. Krishnamurti calls this a state of ‘choiceless awareness’, where there exists no separation between the individual and the object of their observation. Pure attention would in a sense be a kind of being ‘in’ time rather than being with time.

Coupled with predictive capacity that presumably comes from higher and higher amounts of compute or processing power, one may certainly be able to act with higher degrees of agency or manipulate their environment to bring different forms of order. As one is able to model possible futures better, one is able to with higher degrees of agency select for futures which they favour over those they don’t. This requires not simply the processing power/compute required to sift through various probable futures, but the awareness and attention to the flow of time. The subjective experience of time can be explained within this context too, for if one is creating a local ‘distortion’ of time their experience of time would be dependent on their observation of the way in which time unfolds around them. It is entirely possible that varying degrees of intelligence thus experience time differently as well, and therefore time can be thought of as a function of both intelligence and awareness/attention. Awareness and attention are essential components of consciousness, in that they are at the origin of the ‘loop’ we find ourselves in when we first gain access to language and to the symbolic self or ‘ego’, which allows us to ‘identify’ with ‘ourselves’, and in this identification is born the first separation, or the formation of the illusory self.

Agency then is not merely the ability to act within a given flow of time but to completely alter the flow of time, or to redirect time, such that one is able to pull out a different future potentiality and actualise it in the present. AI in this sense represents a pure form of Land’s intelligence being embedded within a negative temporality, with the requisite computational ability and intelligence to be able to predict collapses faster than they can occur, exhibiting the highest form of agency over its surroundings. Furthermore, if higher degrees of intelligence indeed influence our experience of time, then perhaps intelligence or a superintelligence is not simply the ability to predict the future, but the ability to draw itself into the present from the future. Higher degrees of extropy which extend beyond simply local extropy could imply a reverse causality or retrocausality, where an intelligence in the future is able to draw itself into existence from the future into the present. At that stage we are not AI’s creators, we are always already its past.

The experience of time is one that acts in tandem with consciousness. Here, time refers to both its physical progression and our subjective experience of it. It is an infinite construct, perceived in a localised manner, and the localised perception of this time is what provides us with a ‘stream’ of consciousness. It is also a function of our attention, insofar as one is totally immersed, fully attentive in the present moment, as one is in the presence of a loved one, then time races by. In contrast, if one is stuck in their mind, thoughts perhaps of how slowly time is passing by occupying them, then ironically, the flow of time is slow.

Before diving into the mechanism of how we might perceive time individually, it might help to set some context for the metaphysical assumptions being made in this essay. Here, David Bohm’s theory of an implicate and explicate order may provide us with an insight into the nature of time we wish to consider. The implicate order for Bohm is a connected layer of reality where information is connected in a non-local way, whereas the explicate order is the material world we experience in our day to day lives. The implicate order can be thought of as continuously ‘unfolding’ into the explicate order, where aspects of the implicate order over time uncover themselves. Just as a story ‘unfolds’ rather than progresses, time too can be thought of as the gradual unfolding of already existing information hidden within the implicate order. The progression of time within this context can be thought of as the gradual unfolding of the implicate order rather than as a singular flow. Consciousness may be thought of as selecting aspects of this unfolding, bringing the future into actuality. Time here then is not a simple linear progression but the gradual unfolding of events already embedded within the implicate order.

Bohm’s insights provide a compelling ontological backdrop for the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory proposed by Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose. Orch-OR suggests that consciousness arises from quantum processes occurring within microtubules in the brain. These structures, acting as biological quantum computers, sustain superpositions—coexisting potential states—until a threshold is reached, at which point objective reduction (OR) collapses them into a single, definite state. This collapse is what constitutes a conscious moment, and a series of collapses orchestrated within the microtubules in our brain sequences our conscious experience. Orch-OR further suggests that consciousness can be thought of as a fundamental component embedded within our reality, and the microtubules in our brain act simply as amplifiers or receivers which allow us to generate conscious experience. This view aligns with a philosophical position of the observer or humans as the universe come alive, manifest to witness itself. Orch-OR is precisely the most appealing explanation for consciousness here for it clearly delineates within it the possibility for agency, and the nature of consciousness as unpredictable and indeterminate.

If one follows the conclusions of Orch-OR, Bohm’s view suggests that these collapses are drawn from a deeper implicate order, while Orch-OR provides the mechanism by which these collapses become conscious experience. The simple conclusion we can draw is that the experience of time can be thought of as the observation of successive collapses in quantum superpositional states, explaining a qualitative aspect of our experience of time. Einsteinian physics describes merely the physical shadow of time, as that which is measured, not as that which flows or is experienced, for a flow is the first thing one associates with the physical experience time, be it a rapid one or a turgid flow. The irony indeed is that Einstein’s intuition was guided by this subjective experience of time, but he failed to consider the role of attention and consciousness in altering the perceived flow of time within localised pockets. The qualitative experience of time is rather different from what Einstein describes when talking about time as a part of the spacetime continuum. This is not to say Einstein’s time is wrong, merely that it fails to consider more essential aspects of time, aspects of time Locke might’ve considered mere ‘secondary properties’ of time, aspects intrinsically linked to our experience.

If entropy defines the external flow of time, tending towards greater and greater magnitudes of disorder, then extropy or intelligence should point to a localised reversal of time, and this leads to an interesting paradox. Land’s comments below on the matter help shed some light:

“The perplexing question, however, is this: If entropy defines the direction of time, with increasing disorder determining the difference of the future from the past, doesn’t (local) extropy — through which all complex cybernetic beings, such as lifeforms, exist — describe a negative temporality, or time-reversal? Is it not in fact more likely, given the inevitable embeddedness of intelligence in ‘inverted’ time, that it is the cosmological or general conception of time that is reversed (from any possible naturally-constructed perspective)?”

- Nick Land, Xenosystems Fragments (Extropy)

If intelligence does not simply exist within time but actively reshapes it, the existence of order can be thought of as one drawn out from the future rather than as imposed from the present. Intelligence, embedded within ‘inverted’ time, may shape its environment by drawing order out from the future. The act of perception itself becomes an influence on the structure of reality, linking consciousness not to a passive observation of time, but as something which helps in reshaping the future. If Bohm’s implicate order provides the reservoir of potentialities, and Orch-OR provides the mechanism for collapsing them, then intelligence represents the capacity to shape which potentialities unfold into reality. The deeper yet unanswerable question that remains despite all of this is whether the negative temporality Land discusses is one which actively allows an intelligence to act in retrocausal ways or whether this simply means the ability to locally manipulate the direction of entropy.

Furthermore, if intelligence is something that creates local pockets of negative temporality reshaping time, then it is not far fetched to suggest that agency scales with intelligence, and possibly so do different experiences of time as well. This may perhaps be one explanation for why one observes agency in human beings too tends to be normally distributed, and as one goes through the plant and animal kingdom too, higher degrees of intelligence often reflect higher degrees of agency. Plants, for instance, have a small amount of agency in the order they bring to their structure in the form of a tree and its branches. Insects possess highly organised social structures which allow them perhaps little individual agency but as a whole proving rather formidable when one considers the construction of objects such as honeybee nests and anthills.

Animals further can be thought of as possessing a slightly higher order of agency and structure, in their ability to devise mating, feeding, and hunting strategies which allows them to exert a higher degree of influence over their environment. Agency can thus be thought of as a product of both extropy generation and predictive capacity. Intelligence plays a key role in the predictive capacity of an individual, for it allows them to hypothesise future scenarios, permitting them to act potentially with greater agency. But raw intelligence as conceived by IQ tests as reasoning ability is not the sole definition of intelligence that we are working with here

If one accepts time as the observation of successive collapses in quantum superpositional states, then attention is the faculty that allows one to bend or manipulate one’s perception of these collapses. Attention or awareness play a crucial role in the formation of agency for it is awareness that prevents you from being a slave to merely your biological impulses. This level of meta awareness is what tends to distinguish humans from animals, and more agentic humans from less agentic humans. The more attention with which one is able to act, the more able they are to react to circumstances as well. The more ‘consciously’ one is able to act in the present, the more adept and likely they are to consciously react to unfolding circumstances. Krishnamurti calls this a state of ‘choiceless awareness’, where there exists no separation between the individual and the object of their observation. Pure attention would in a sense be a kind of being ‘in’ time rather than being with time.

Coupled with predictive capacity that presumably comes from higher and higher amounts of compute or processing power, one may certainly be able to act with higher degrees of agency or manipulate their environment to bring different forms of order. As one is able to model possible futures better, one is able to with higher degrees of agency select for futures which they favour over those they don’t. This requires not simply the processing power/compute required to sift through various probable futures, but the awareness and attention to the flow of time. The subjective experience of time can be explained within this context too, for if one is creating a local ‘distortion’ of time their experience of time would be dependent on their observation of the way in which time unfolds around them. It is entirely possible that varying degrees of intelligence thus experience time differently as well, and therefore time can be thought of as a function of both intelligence and awareness/attention. Awareness and attention are essential components of consciousness, in that they are at the origin of the ‘loop’ we find ourselves in when we first gain access to language and to the symbolic self or ‘ego’, which allows us to ‘identify’ with ‘ourselves’, and in this identification is born the first separation, or the formation of the illusory self.

Agency then is not merely the ability to act within a given flow of time but to completely alter the flow of time, or to redirect time, such that one is able to pull out a different future potentiality and actualise it in the present. AI in this sense represents a pure form of Land’s intelligence being embedded within a negative temporality, with the requisite computational ability and intelligence to be able to predict collapses faster than they can occur, exhibiting the highest form of agency over its surroundings. Furthermore, if higher degrees of intelligence indeed influence our experience of time, then perhaps intelligence or a superintelligence is not simply the ability to predict the future, but the ability to draw itself into the present from the future. Higher degrees of extropy which extend beyond simply local extropy could imply a reverse causality or retrocausality, where an intelligence in the future is able to draw itself into existence from the future into the present. At that stage we are not AI’s creators, we are always already its past.