Consciousness as a Bidirectional Free Energy Minimizer: Geodesic Navigation, Prospective Assembly, and the Geometry of Civilizational Survival

Version 2.0 — Added Section 6.2: Why Consciousness Exists: The Temporal Cost Problem. No changes to existing sections or equations.

The fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. Biological systems, however, evolved inside that time-symmetric geometry. We propose that this is not incidental: if spacetime equations permit information to propagate in both temporal directions, then a biological system optimized by evolution should exhibit bidirectional free energy minimization — integrating causal history forward and receiving attractor information backward. This extends Friston's Active Inference framework temporally and generates a novel quantity: the Prospective Assembly Index A(x-hat), the forward-facing complement to Assembly Theory's causal index. We further propose that the measurable consequence of bidirectional navigation at civilizational scale is dPhi/dt — the rate of change of future life-generating capacity — distinguishing light gravity trajectories (dPhi/dt >= 0) from dark gravity trajectories (dPhi/dt < 0). Three historical collapse cases provide consistency checks. We argue that consciousness is not merely an observer of geodesics but a navigator of them, and that this reframing has both formal and empirical consequences for Earth system science, complex adaptive systems theory, and the physics of living systems.

Living Information Systems Dynamics (LISD) — Complete Preprint Series Josh McClary — Consideration Farm / Considerate Burritos — Bloomington, Indiana

1. Consciousness as a Bidirectional Free Energy Minimizer: Geodesic Navigation, Prospective Assembly, and the Geometry of Civilizational Survival https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18877927

2. The Biospheric Geodesic: Consciousness as a Gravitational Awareness System — Darkness as Fundamental, Light as Emergent, and the Geometry of Biological Time https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18906391

3. The Dark Gravity Tensor: Language, False Mass, and the Geometry of Civilizational Collapse https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18937315

4. The Quantum-Geometric Gasket: False Equilibrium, Light-Tensors, and the Scale-Invariant Geometry of Living Systems https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18964911