The Framework in Five Steps

What if you could relive yesterday with no memory of having lived it before? With identical starting conditions, the day unfolds exactly the same way.

This simple conclusion that life events occur deterministically—meaning identical conditions produce identical outcomes—points to something profound about the nature of existence itself. This thought experiment seems to contain a fundamental truth about the universe that's worth exploring. What if this fact about cause and effect reveals cosmic truths about consciousness and time?

The challenge was to find a system that allowed all these properties to be true: (1) we experience time flowing, (2) living involves emotion and uncertainty, (3) we make real choices that affect our future, and (4) yet replay would be identical. But how could living truly feel "real" if replay had to be identical? And if our lives unfold deterministically, how can we make decisions that affect our future?

This all made sense when I connected these ideas from three different sciences: physics, neuroscience, and complex systems theory:

• The universe is a four-dimensional spacetime structure.
• Brains operate deterministically.
• We exert agency as our brains are immensely complex systems that constrain future behavior.

Here is how I think about the Conscious Permanence framework in five straightforward steps:

1. Spacetime: The universe is a four-dimensional structure containing all space and time. An object at a given time point exists in the 4D structure. Just as an entire movie exists permanently on a DVD even though you watch one scene at a time, all moments exist permanently in spacetime's structure.
2. The Slide: Your neural arrangement at each moment in life exists in spacetime. All moments of your life form a slide through the time dimension. Therefore, each snapshot of your life is permanent in spacetime.
3. The Sliding: Your neurons change through time as they activate and modify their arrangement. All of these changes occur deterministically. These neural changes exist inside spacetime and are also permanent.
4. Conscious Permanence: Consciousness is the experience of neurons firing as time progresses. As consciousness is the sliding process, and the process exists permanently in spacetime, every conscious moment exists permanently.
5. Agency: Through your brain's vast complexity, you shape the future of your life despite your brain's deterministic operation. Every choice you make becomes permanent in the universe.

Together, these steps reveal why the Replay Thought Experiment works: we're not just living once and disappearing. Instead we're creating permanent conscious experiences that exist forever in the fabric of spacetime itself. Every moment of joy, every struggle, and every discovery in your life lives eternally.

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© 2025 Cory Lanker. This work is licensed under Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).