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A Life-Physics Constraint on Subjective Time: Schrödinger and the Natural Criticality Hypothesis
A unified principle of subjective time has yet to be established. Existing accounts have related temporal experience to prediction, belief dynamics, inte- roception, affect, and bodily state, but a deeper question remains insufficiently addressed: under what biological conditions can a living nervous system sus- tain the dynamics from which subjective time emerges? The present paper addresses this problem by placing the Natural Criticality Hypothesis of Sub- jective Time in dialogue with Schrödinger’s life-physics question of how order is maintained against collapse in a non-equilibrium system. We argue that, in nervous systems, the relevant form of maintained order is not static stability but transition-capable order: a regime in which coherence is preserved while meaningful state transition remains possible. This condition is proposed to depend on organization near criticality and to be expressible, at a coarse-grained level, by action-readiness density, r(t), a state variable summa- rizing the organism’s maintained proximity to coordinated behavioural release. Building on earlier formulations of the Natural Criticality Hypothesis (CLaE, 2026a,b,c,d), we interpret r(t) as supported by gain modulation, interoceptive precision, predictive coherence, and embodied boundary conditions. Within this framework, subjective time is reformulated as the phenomenol- ogy of maintained distance to release, expressed by the bridge principle ts(t) ∝ 1/r(t). Subjective time is thus treated neither as the output of an internal clock nor merely as a higher-order representation of elapsed duration, but as the lived structure of a living system’s current nearness or remoteness to possible action. Time dilates when transition-capable order weakens and re- lease becomes dynamically remote; time compresses when coordinated release becomes near. The paper further argues that readiness cannot be maintained in isolation. Boundary-supported embodiment and contingent second-person interaction are positioned as conditions under which transition-capable order can be sus- tained or restored. In this sense, subjective time is constrained not only by neural organization, but by the organism’s regulated openness to body, envi- ronment, and others. The central claim is not that Schrödinger’s quantum theory explains con- sciousness, but that Schrödinger’s more fundamental question about life sets a lower bound on any viable theory of lived temporality. Subjective time, on this view, must be constrained by life-physics before it is elaborated into cognition, phenomenology, or clinical theory. The Natural Criticality Hypoth- esis is therefore reinterpreted as a neurodynamic continuation of Schrödinger’s problem: how a living system maintains order in a form that keeps transition possible, and how that maintained proximity to action is experienced from within as time.
