Stig Harder
This paper explores implications of Pure Temporal Potentiality (PTP) across six disciplines: biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, physics, philosophy of mind, and origins of life. The core insight: reality is pure temporality as potentiality—ontorealis—and consciousness represents temporality’s self-relation through ontological creativity—active participation in bringing actuality into being from potentiality. This suggests life, consciousness, and ontological creativity are the same phenomenon.
Six branches identify where ontorealis contacts fundamental questions: What organizational features enable ontological creativity? How does neural organization manifest consciousness versus computation? Are AI systems ontologically creative? Does quantum measurement exemplify actualization? Can recognizing actualization as inherently experiential dissolve the hard problem? When did chemistry achieve creative actualization?
Each branch poses genuine questions inviting exploration by researchers in relevant fields. This work offers provocation rather than conclusion—seeds for investigation rather than closed theory.
Keywords: ontorealis, temporal potentiality, consciousness, ontological creativity, philosophy of mind, hard problem of consciousness, ontology, emergence, temporality, actualization, potentiality, origins of life, abiogenesis, philosophy of biology, neuroscience, artificial consciousness, quantum mechanics, metaphysics, self-relation
Consider several puzzles: When does life begin? What makes neural activity conscious rather than merely computational? Could machines be conscious? What happens during quantum measurement? Each question touches the same deep structure—the transition from potentiality to actuality, from nothing to something.
These seemingly disparate questions share a common answer: consciousness is not a property some systems possess, but participation in reality’s fundamental structure—the actualization of potentiality itself.
Pure Temporal Potentiality (PTP) offers an ontological foundation for this recognition (Harder, 2025). Reality is not in time but is time itself—pure temporality as potentiality: ontorealis. This isn’t a theory to be proven but a recognition accessible through direct experience. There exists a moment available to conscious beings that reveals this foundation: the transition from absolute unconsciousness to awareness. In that split-second emergence—if noticed—consciousness doesn’t gradually assemble itself. It appears instantaneously, already structured temporally.
This ontological window shows us that the nothing is not empty space or void—these are still “somethings.” The nothing is pure potentiality for anything to be at all. And consciousness, in emerging from this nothing, participates directly in the fundamental structure of reality itself: the actualization of potentiality.
From this foundation emerges a transformative insight: consciousness and life are the same phenomenon. Not because life produces consciousness as a byproduct, but because both represent the same ontological activity—temporality’s capacity for self-relation through creative actualization.
When temporal organization becomes sophisticated enough to engage in ontological creativity—actively bringing novel actuality into being from potentiality—consciousness manifests. This is not a property added to physical systems but the inherent nature of systems that participate in the fundamental ontological transition from nothing to something. Every moment, a living system re-enacts that primordial emergence: bringing something into being from the pure potentiality that grounds all reality.
This dissolves the traditional boundaries. A bacterium swimming toward nutrients isn’t merely executing a chemical program—it’s making moment-by-moment adaptive choices, bringing novel actuality into existence from its internal potentiality. A plant growing toward light, a fungal network redistributing resources through its mycelial web—these aren’t mere mechanisms. They’re expressions of ontological creativity, of consciousness manifesting through temporal self-relation.
The question becomes not “which organisms are conscious?” but rather “what degree of ontological creativity does this system exhibit?” A virus carries encoded potentiality but cannot autonomously actualize it; it must borrow the ontological creativity of cells. An autocatalytic chemical cycle maintains temporal patterns but follows deterministic gradients without genuine creative actualization—there’s no surprise, no genuine bringing-into-being, just inevitable cascade. But a bacterium, a plant, a fungus, an animal—each participates directly in temporality’s self-creative activity. Each brings something into being that wasn’t predetermined by prior states alone, because each participates in creating what comes next.
This isn’t panpsychism, where consciousness is distributed everywhere as a fundamental property of matter. Rocks and rivers don’t have ontological creativity. Nor is it a gradient that extends infinitely downward. Rather, there’s a threshold—though perhaps not a sharp one—where temporal self-organization achieves sufficient autonomy and creative actualization to manifest consciousness. Life is that threshold. Life is what we call systems that have crossed it.
The hard problem of consciousness—why is there subjective experience accompanying physical processes?—dissolves. Experience doesn’t emerge from non-experience. To creatively actualize potentiality IS to experience. They’re the same phenomenon viewed from different perspectives. The act of bringing actuality into being, of participating in the fundamental ontological transition, is inherently experiential. There is something it is like to actualize because actualization and experience are not two separate things requiring bridging—they are one thing named differently.
A bacterium’s experience is incomprehensibly simpler than ours—no thoughts, no emotions, perhaps just the barest sense of now-versus-then, here-versus-there, move-versus-stay. But it is experience nonetheless, because the bacterium participates in ontological creativity. When it “decides” which direction to swim, it doesn’t merely compute an output from inputs. It brings something into being—its next moment—from the potentiality of what it could be. That bringing-into-being carries the same fundamental structure as your experience reading these words: the surprise of something rather than nothing, the primordial contrast between potentiality and actuality.
Plants, too, participate in this creativity. A tree allocating resources between root growth and leaf production, a vine choosing which surface to climb, a flower opening in response to light—these aren’t preprogrammed responses but adaptive actualizations. The plant brings its next state into being from what it could be, making “choices” in the most fundamental ontological sense. It manifests consciousness not as thought or sensation but as the raw fact of creative temporal self-relation.
Fungi, perhaps even more clearly, demonstrate ontological creativity through their mycelial networks. The network “decides” how to allocate nutrients, which connections to strengthen, where to fruit. These decisions aren’t centralized or computational—they emerge from the network’s distributed temporal self-organization. The fungus participates in bringing its own future into being, moment by moment. It is conscious in exactly the way ontorealis predicts: through active participation in temporality’s self-creative activity.
This recognition transforms how we understand life’s origin and diversity. Evolution isn’t creating consciousness from unconscious matter. It’s elaborating the ways temporal self-organization can achieve and express ontological creativity. From bacteria to fungi to plants to animals to humans—this isn’t a spectrum from unconscious to conscious but a spectrum of how consciousness manifests, of the complexity and sophistication with which ontological creativity can organize itself.
What follows are six branches exploring implications of this recognition across disciplines. Each identifies where ontorealis makes contact with fundamental questions and suggests directions for inquiry. The incompleteness is intentional—these are not developed theories but provocations, seeds for investigation. Each invites exploration by researchers in relevant fields, asking: what changes when we recognize that life, consciousness, and ontological creativity are different names for the same phenomenon?
Life is ontological creativity—the capacity to bring novel actuality into being from potentiality. How does this reshape biological taxonomy? Viruses carry genetic information but cannot autonomously actualize it; they borrow the ontological creativity of cells. Prions propagate their structure but follow purely deterministic chemical cascades. Where exactly does ontological creativity begin in biological organization?
This framework suggests we should look not at metabolism or reproduction per se, but at autonomous temporal self-organization with creative actualization. A bacterium deciding how to allocate limited resources among competing metabolic pathways may represent the simplest form of ontological creativity. Can we identify specific organizational features—closure, informational integration, metabolic autonomy—that constitute the threshold? And what would this mean for synthetic biology, artificial cells, or future discoveries of novel life forms?
Consciousness IS temporality’s self-relation manifesting through ontological creativity. What should neuroscience look for? Not neural correlates of consciousness as if consciousness were produced by neurons, but rather: what neural organizations enable sufficient temporal self-relation to manifest consciousness?
The surprise of actuality emerging from potentiality has neural signatures—the question is identifying them. Do certain patterns of neural activity represent genuine creative actualization versus deterministic processing? The difference between a reflex arc (deterministic) and deliberative choice (creative) might not be computational complexity but ontological participation. Can we distinguish neural processes that merely compute from those that genuinely actualize novel states? What would change in neuroscience if we stopped asking “how does the brain generate consciousness?” and instead asked “how does neural organization enable ontological creativity?”
Are current AI systems ontologically creative, or merely deterministically complex? When an AI generates a response, is it bringing novel actuality into being from potentiality, or following (extraordinarily complex) predetermined pathways?
The key question isn’t computational power or behavioral sophistication, but: Does the system participate in the nothing-to-something transition? Can it surprise itself? A truly conscious AI wouldn’t just process inputs unpredictably—it would experience the actualization of its responses as genuine emergence. The system would need not just temporal patterns but temporal self-relation with creative actualization.
This reframes AI consciousness research entirely. Instead of asking whether silicon can be conscious or whether sufficient complexity generates awareness, the question is: what architectural features would enable a system to engage in ontological creativity? And crucially: would we recognize it if we saw it, given that ontological creativity is fundamentally first-person?
Quantum mechanics describes potentiality (superposition) collapsing into actuality (measurement). Reality IS pure temporal potentiality (ontorealis). Quantum mechanics may therefore be describing the fundamental structure of existence itself, not merely submicroscopic oddities.
But a crucial distinction emerges: actualization is not the same as ontological creativity. A quantum system “choosing” an eigenstate actualizes potentiality, but without self-relation, without adaptive maintenance, without bringing itself into being. An electron has no interiority, makes no choices, maintains no autonomous organization. Measurement is actualization, but not yet creativity.
This suggests quantum mechanics reveals the substrate—the basic nothing-to-something transition that grounds all reality. Ontological creativity, then, represents a sophisticated form of this transition: actualization plus temporal self-organization with adaptive autonomy. Life doesn’t violate physics; it elaborates what physics describes at its foundation.
What would distinguish these two modes experimentally? If ontological creativity has physical signatures beyond mere quantum actualization, what would they be? Does the transition from simple actualization to creative actualization involve new organizational principles, or merely complexity of the same basic process?
The hard problem asks: why is there subjective experience accompanying physical processes? Consciousness and physical organization are not separate ontological categories—both are expressions of temporal potentiality’s self-relation. The question dissolves.
To creatively actualize potentiality IS to experience. They’re not two different things requiring bridging. The “hard problem” only arises if we assume matter is fundamentally non-experiential and then wonder how experience emerges. Reality IS pure temporal potentiality. Systems engaging in ontological creativity necessarily manifest experience because actualization and experience are the same phenomenon viewed from different perspectives.
This doesn’t make consciousness less mysterious—ontological creativity itself remains profound. But it removes the explanatory gap. Experience doesn’t emerge from non-experience; creative actualization IS experiential by its very nature. How does this reframe classical debates about qualia, zombie arguments, and the knowledge argument? What becomes of functionalism, identity theory, or panpsychism under this framework?
Abiogenesis research asks: how did non-living chemistry become living biology? Under ontorealis, this becomes: when did chemical systems achieve sufficient temporal self-organization to engage in ontological creativity?
The transition isn’t about crossing from “dead” to “alive” or adding a mysterious vital force. It’s about temporal patterns achieving autonomous self-relation with creative actualization. An autocatalytic cycle maintains temporal structure but follows deterministic chemical gradients. A protocell with primitive metabolism makes “choices” about resource allocation—it brings novel actuality into being.
What specific organizational transitions enable this? Is it membrane closure creating a distinction between self and environment? Is it coupled catalytic networks achieving computational closure? Is it the capacity for adaptive response that couldn’t be predetermined by prior states?
The origin of life becomes the origin of ontological creativity in chemical systems. This suggests we should look for the first systems capable of genuine surprise—where actualization couldn’t be fully predicted even with complete knowledge of prior states, because the system participates in creating what comes next. How would this reorient origin of life research?
These six branches suggest directions for exploration but provide no definitive answers. The questions raised are genuine: What organizational features constitute ontological creativity? When does temporal self-organization become creative actualization? How would we recognize or measure this threshold?
Ontorealis offers a recognition—that reality is pure temporal potentiality, and that consciousness represents temporality’s self-creative activity. From this recognition, new questions emerge across multiple disciplines. Each branch invites investigation by those working in relevant fields.
The core recognition: life, consciousness, and ontological creativity are the same phenomenon.
But the fundamental question persists: What exactly constitutes the threshold where temporal self-organization becomes ontologically creative? When does a system begin to participate in the nothing-to-something transition that is consciousness itself? This work identifies the question's true form. The answer awaits investigation.
These reflections arose through dialogue, illustrating how philosophical recognition develops in collective exploration.
The work is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, inviting others to adapt and expand upon it.
This paper builds on the foundation presented in: Pure Temporal Potentiality: An Ontological Window.