Consciousness-Indexed Time and Its Engineering Implementation as a Brain-Derived Temporal Reference for Human-Aligned Intelligent Systems

Physics writes time as a one-place primitive and intelligent systems inherit that convention through the timestamp, yet every operational determination of a duration compares two counting processes. This work develops a consciousness-indexed alternative in which the reference count is generated by an observer rather than by an oscillator, and carries it through to a buildable implementation. Elapsed duration, relative clock rate and the observer count are defined as dimensionally distinct quantities, and the SI coordinate is recovered as the calibration case in which the caesium rate occupies the denominator. The granular structure of the observer count comes from the analysis of mind on which the author's earlier work rests, in which consciousness is momentary and object-directed and co-arises with contact, feeling, volition, perception and attention. Contact supplies the countable event, while the other factors modulate the rate and reliability of the count rather than adding to it, which is what makes them measurable. Compatibility with relativity is secured by an explicit postulate under which the count is proportional to proper time, and four admissibility criteria govern the programme, two of which remain openly unmet.

The implementation is a consciousness-indexed delay-locked loop. Factor-specific detectors return the time of a human-relevant event with stated uncertainty, a phase detector forms the error against the machine's planned action time, and a clipped proportional-integral filter drives an adaptive delay under a probabilistic lock condition, with physical clock time retained for calibration and safety. Two results specify the design. The error recursion is stable exactly when the integral gain is positive and the gain difference lies between zero and two, a region covering 54.1 per cent of the surveyed gain plane, and representative gains correct a timing bias to within ten per cent in nine contact events. Because no stability figure yet exists for a brain-derived reference, an open record of 23,547 daily determinations of an analogous reference is used. Its Allan deviation rises with averaging time at an exponent of 0.14 ± 0.09 rather than the −0.5 expected of a reference that averages down, so longer integration cannot replace feedback.

The work is metaphilosophical in the conference's sense. It treats the fragmentation between physics and consciousness research as a difference of vocabulary about a single operation, counting and comparing, which metrology names realisation, psychophysics names temporal resolution and quantum foundations names distinguishability. Naming that shared operation renders the disciplines commensurable, which is argued to be the precondition of philosophical unity rather than its consequence, and is offered as one concrete route to epistemic defragmentation. The work engages the operationalist tradition of Poincaré, Bridgman and Reichenbach, the timeless programme of Page and Wootters, contemporary consciousness science, and the Abhidhamma analysis of mind from which the event structure is drawn. Its distinctive move is to convert a philosophical claim about the nature of time into a falsifiable control problem, while holding the boundary that consciousness-related proxies are validated indicators and not measurements of phenomenal experience.