Consciousness as a Causal Bridge

From Black Holes to Birth

🕳️⚪A Projection Looping Back ⚪🕳️

“The most important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” … Einstein

Across the curvature of spacetime, there are regions where the known laws of physics bend toward mystery. Black holes: the endpoints of stellar collapse, where information compresses beyond the limits of imagination. But what if this isn’t the end?

What if on the other side of that collapse, something new begins?

Physicists have long speculated about white holes.. the time-reversed counterparts of black holes. In theory, they are emission zones …regions that only expel, never ingest. If a black hole is death by gravity, the white hole is birth by explosion.

I hear more and more scientists taking in the idea that we are indeed on the other side of a black hole - or what can be said as ‘living inside a black hole’. The evolutionary universe theory seems to be gaining more and more traction … Black holes may be cosmic wombs.

Physicist Lee Smolin proposed that each black hole could birth a new universe with slightly altered physical laws … much like biological reproduction. This is called Cosmological Natural Selection (see Smolin, The Life of the Cosmos, 1997).

• Universes that produce more black holes "reproduce" more … evolving over time.

In this view, black holes are reproductive organs, and the multiverse evolves like life: through selection, mutation, and inheritance.

But physics may not be the only place where this pattern appears. Here is where this concept has woken me up tonight…

The Human Mind: A Projection That Projects

We are, by all accounts, products of this universe. But more profoundly … we are projections from it that have gained the ability to project back into it.

The mind simulates futures. It models choices, runs experiments internally, and loops back to make decisions in the present. Beyond poetic metaphor … it’s how decision-making, intention, and planning seem to unfold in the brain. Neurologically and cognitively, our awareness is the forward edge of entropy shaped into structure.

The mind is a projection from the cosmos that projects futures into being.

We don’t merely observe reality; we shape it .. through action, through story, and, most critically, through commitment.

Commitment Pools: The Protocols of Intentional Evolution

In resource coordination systems, a framework called Commitment Pooling can be seen as trust routing. A Commitment Pool is a network of promises structured by four metabolic functions:

1. Curation – Choosing what kinds of commitments matter.

2. Valuation – Acknowledging which commitments carry trust-weight.

3. Limitation – Setting the bounds of one’s promise-making capacity.

4. Exchange – Swapping one’s own promises for others’, when trust allows.

These pools hey form a relational lattice … a decentralized architecture of mutual trust that can be seen in all living systems.

Picture it: each commitment as a time-anchored thread, connecting a past fulfillment to a future promise. A voucher (a formalization of commitment) becomes a kind of wormhole … a translation … an intertemporal bridge across agents, ecosystems, and generations.

In that sense, Commitment Pools are like interdimensional membranes … not unlike those theorized to connect black holes to white holes in an evolutionary cosmos. Where physical wormholes route energy, these pools route intention … the most basic fuel of conscious participation in a living universe.

Commitment as Time-Loop

A commitment is not just a declaration. It seems to be a fold in time an intention anchored in the now that binds us to a specific strand of the future. It may take the form of a promise to a friend, a contract in a community, a whispered vow to one’s descendants.

But structurally, it is something deeper:

Commitments are time-folds … intentions looped into matter.

In the physics of information, the past is a certification … a ledger of what has already been recorded. The future, however, is more like a voucher .. a claim that something will be made real. We …. capable of both memory and imagination, become the bridge between the two.

We Are a Bridge

Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of modern times is the belief that we are passive observers in a deterministic cosmos. We seem to be causal anomalies …entities capable of collapsing information inward (like black holes), and radiating structured meaning outward (like white holes).

When we consume without returning, when we hoard attention, energy, or resources … we behave like localized black holes.
When we imagine, commit, redeem, and regenerate … we connect as fabric of the social universe (multiverse of pools).

We are a bridge, a fold, a loop.

In Buddhist tradition, a Bodhisattva is one who attains awakening but chooses to remain … to assist all beings in reaching liberation. In this cosmic-evolutionary light, the Bodhisattva is like a conscious agent at the event horizon … hovering between black hole collapse and white hole emergence.

They carry the memory of the past (black hole) and seed the conditions for awakening (white hole). The Bodhisattva enters the black holes of samsara—of trauma, ignorance, destruction … But instead of being consumed, they hold intention steady, and loop it forward into liberated futures.

Perhaps like a wormhole of compassion, they carry karma as pathway … allowing others to cross.

In the language of commitment pools: Their vow ("until all beings are free") is a voucher issued across time. Their presence is a recursive trust node … stabilizing the cosmic economy of suffering and awakening.

They are like a regenerative function in the multiversal field: Not escaping collapse, but redeeming it .. birthing worlds of possibility from the ashes of entropy.

In short I like to imagine the Bodhisattva is the cosmic agent we all have within who, facing collapse, chooses to become a bridge.

Reflection - Remembrance

Feynman once said, “I... have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, ‘Look how beautiful it is,’ and I'll agree. But then he'll say, ‘I as an artist can see how beautiful a flower is. But you as a scientist, oh take it all apart and it becomes dull.’”

But Feynman knew the opposite was true.

The more we understand, the more profound the beauty becomes. To see yourself not merely as a cluster of neurons .. but as a causal link between cosmic collapse and emergent life, between entropy and choice… is a truth both physical and sacred.

So let us not merely exist.
Let us remember and commit.
Let us bridge the chasm between what was and what will be, with care, with memory, and with futures we dare to imagine into form.