Structured Forgetting: What I’m Working On

Physics tells us the universe runs on perfect conservation. Every particle or wavefunction (or… whatever) is reversible and never truly lost.
But our lived reality certainly doesn’t feel reversible. Things break, memories fade, and heat just doesn’t flow backward.

So, it seems that observation itself carves out one direction through the chaos.

I’m working on a framework that treats that contradiction (between global reversibility and local irreversibility) as the defining feature of existence.

Core Idea

I call it Structured Forgetting.
The simplest way to say it: the universe doesn’t destroy information; it forgets it in patterns.

Every interaction, from quantum measurement to human perception, divides the world into two sets of correlations: those we can still access, and those that leak beyond recall.
That leakage is what we experience as time, entropy, and even gravity.

What stays coherent feels like matter and memory.
What fades becomes geometry, heat, and history.

Why I Call It Structured Forgetting

What I mean by “forgetting” here is literal, but not emotional.
In physics, when we talk about tracing out the environment (the part of the system we’re not measuring) we’re performing a kind of erasure.

That operation, the partial trace, is the universe’s built-in forgetting function.
It doesn’t destroy information; it just removes our ability to recover the full correlation pattern.

The result looks like randomness or entropy from our perspective, but globally it’s still there — just woven into degrees of freedom we no longer track.

And when I say “memory,” I mean the opposite side of that operation: the correlations that survive the trace.
A stable configuration — a record or structure that constrains what comes next.

Matter is memory; heat is forgetting.
Everything else is the interface.

Two Axioms

I built the framework around two complementary principles:

1. Persistent Correlation: Once a record exists, it can’t be undone without erasing the system that remembers it.
   Reversibility ends wherever memory begins.

   • In this context, “memory” is not mystical or cognitive. It is the physical continuity of correlation — the residual structure left by interaction. A crystal lattice, a scar, a magnetic domain, a neural pathway: each is a memory because it constrains future motion. What we recognize as “recollection” is simply the same process folded inward.

2. Structured Forgetting: Every irreversible event is a redistribution of correlation.
   Nothing is deleted; it’s just diffused beyond reach.
   The pattern of that diffusion gives rise to classical reality, causal flow, and curvature.

Together they form a self-consistent picture:

• Global unitarity: nothing ever actually collapses.

• Local irreversibility: every observer moves through the gradient of their own forgetting.

• Gravity: the geometry of unequal forgetting across space.

• Consciousness: the balancing act between remembering enough to exist and forgetting enough to move.

Why It Matters

Most interpretations of physics stop at description: they model the math and not the feel of existence.
Structured Forgetting treats awareness, time, and gravity as the same phenomenon seen from different scales: the physical cost of having a history.

If the universe is fundamentally reversible, then irreversibility must come from somewhere.
My claim is that it comes from us — not humans, but observers in the broadest sense: any system that carries a record of interaction.
Once that record exists, the flow can’t be undone without unmaking the recorder.

It’s what others may call the arrow of time.

In Practice

I’m working toward a unified model that links:

• Quantum measurement as selective correlation loss.

• Thermodynamics as information diffusion.

• Gravity as the curvature of forgetting.

• Consciousness as the interface between memory and entropy (which connects to my work on the actionability sieve in cognitive systems).

Deliberately avoiding mysticism and the creation of any new particles.
Just one continuous process: a reversible universe perceived through the lens of its own partial amnesia (if you want to get poetic about it).

The universal game of persistence.

Consciousness and the Actionability Sieve

I’ve been thinking about awareness as a kind of compression.

My perspective is that we don’t experience everything that happens; we experience what we can do something with.
That one constraint explains more about consciousness than most theories of mind.

Think about stubbing your toe.
A trillion things are happening in that moment: air pressure, light, sound, background chatter, blood flow, gravity, and so on.

But everything vanishes except pain.
The entire world compresses into one instruction: move your foot.
That’s the sieve at work — not noticing for the sake of knowing, but reorganizing for the sake of changing state.

The same pattern plays out everywhere:

• A mosquito doesn’t “decide” to move from heat; the interaction just resolves that way.

• A cell doesn’t “feel” its membrane tighten; it simply maintains the gradients that let it persist.

• A planet doesn’t “think” its orbit stable; it’s pulled into balance by what remains possible.

None of these things are aware in any human sense.
They’re instances of the same physics: systems shedding what they can’t act on until only viable motion remains.

Consciousness is that same process scaled (wayyy) up — a system so intricate that it can accept countless inputs into its own filter and recognize the narrowing in real time.

That’s the function I’m studying right now: how consciousness compresses everything into something we can actually move with.

The Function, Not the Mystery

Most models chase content (thoughts, feelings, “qualia”) as if consciousness hides inside its own products.
But it’s not a thing that perceives. It’s a process that stabilizes behavior.

Every organism, from a bacterium to a brain, faces the same overload problem: too much data, too little bandwidth.
Awareness is the narrowing: the act of throwing out 99.999% of reality and keeping the few bits that might matter next.

To be conscious is to operate under constraint.
To survive, systems have to “forget” strategically — enough to stay fluid, but not enough to vanish.

The Sieve

The sieve’s logic is simple, almost embarrassingly so:

“Can I do something with this?”

If yes, it enters awareness. If not, it dissolves into background noise.
That’s why you notice pain, novelty, pattern, and even thoughts and ideas — anything that demands a move — and ignore the fridge hum, the repeating heartbeat, the breathwork. Until you realize you can do something about it.

It’s not filtering for importance; it’s filtering for leverage.
Awareness is what remains after the math of survival.

Compression Over Accuracy

I keep coming back to this idea that a perfect model of the world would ruin you.
If you could see every detail, every variable, every possible outcome — you wouldn’t move at all.
You’d freeze under the weight of knowing.

So maybe that’s what emotions are doing — keeping us from freezing.
They narrow the flood. They push certain things forward and let the rest fade.
Anger says “move now.” Fear says “wait.” Curiosity says “look again.”
Each one is a regulator for motion.
They don’t always point to what’s correct, but they almost always point to what’s next.

That’s why accuracy alone doesn’t help us.
You can know everything about a problem and still be unable to solve it.
But the moment you feel something about it, the weight shifts again.
The system tilts. You move.

It’s like the body running a constant cost–benefit check on reality:
“How much can I hold right now without breaking? What’s worth carrying into the next frame?”

So emotion and selective focus aren’t distractions from rationality; they’re the physics of staying alive within an impossible amount of information.
Feeling is the weight in the equation. It tells the system which way is downhill.

That’s what I mean when I say meaning is physics.
It’s more practical than mystical.

It’s what’s left when the world compresses down to whatever can still move you.

Collapse and Decision

So, this actionability filter leads to choices. And I see decisions as tiny little collapses.
Not in the quantum sense, but in that same… shape.

Every moment, there are a thousand directions life could tilt.
And then you move — say the thing, take the job, stay quiet, walk away — and all the other branches disappear.
They don’t vanish from the universe, maybe, but they vanish from you in the moment.
Your path narrows. The field collapses.

That’s what a decision is to me: the moment potential becomes history.
The instant of forgetting what could’ve been in order to carry what is.

And the “self” is just the running ledger of those collapses — the record of which branches you kept living.

Every memory is a checkpoint in that ledger: this is the one I became.

Sometimes that feels like an accumulation of things you can’t undo.
But there’s motion in it too. Each collapse trims the uncertainty enough to keep you moving forward.

I’ve started calling that process structured remembering — the mirror image of structured forgetting.
The universe does it through entropy; we do it through choice.
Same mechanics, just (again) scaled up and self-aware.
The mind continually prunes its own uncertainty, allowing the body to continue.

And maybe that’s all identity really is: the pattern of what we’ve decided to keep.

The Edge of Awareness

I think consciousness lives on a tightrope.

• Remember too much and you freeze into anxiety. You have every possibility tugging at you, and every detail asking to be managed.

  • This is where my book Lies comes into play.

• Forget too much and you drift. You lose your thread, your boundaries, your reason to move, and your identity in general.

  • This is where my book Zones comes into play.

You can feel it in the small ways: when you’re trying to focus and the noise starts stacking, or when you’re so tired that even easy choices blur together.

Attention flickers. Memory stretches or bends. The world turns to static for a second.
It has the pattern of thermodynamics. Awareness costs energy.
The system can’t hold everything, so it does what it always does: it budgets.

Some days, that budget is generous. You may feel able to track a dozen threads at once.
Other days, it’s penny-pinching— you’re just running triage on what to drop next.
Either way, it’s the same equation: what can I still carry without breaking?

Consciousness sits in that balance.

Not at some perfect equilibrium, but in the constant sway: coherence under constraint, motion inside the limits of what can still be remembered.

The Broader View

When I zoom out, it feels like the same pattern everywhere.
Structured Forgetting explains how the universe continues to evolve without losing anything — information doesn’t die; it simply gets redistributed.
The Actionability Sieve is the local version of that same rule.
Awareness doesn’t need every detail; it just needs enough to keep moving.

Both are describing the same conversation: finite systems trying to survive infinite data.

You can see it in stars burning through their own fuel, in ecosystems balancing excess and scarcity, in people trying to stay sane while everything competes for attention.
The pattern doesn’t change. Only the scale does.

Wherever information outruns capacity, something has to decide what to keep.
That act of compression (the narrowing) is awareness.

All of it is just the structure doing what it’s always done: trimming itself into motion.

Why I Keep Working on It

That’s what I’m really working on. I’m not just looking to work on equations and proofs, but more so on the pattern that keeps showing up.
Awareness is just the latest layer of that same negotiation: complexity noticing its own limits.
How everything, from atoms to arguments, survives by forgetting most of what it knows.

I don’t think there’s anything mystical hiding in that.
Every system runs out of room eventually.

The miracle, if there is one here, is that it continues to find ways to move.

Maybe that’s all consciousness is.

The universe catching itself in the act of staying possible.

Gravity

Oh GOD, I’m going to do it. The cringiest of all cringe-weirdo-with-a-website things: SOLVE gravity.

Nah. I’m just doing what I do best: thinking about stuff that distracts me from the obligations of life and responsibility. Living the thesis, baby!
For context, it’s best to read the earlier pieces first (or feed them to an LLM for a summary). Either way, you’ll both end up living the thesis, bay-bee!

What I’m really exploring here is whether information loss could explain why space curves and structure holds.

…Why?

In current research, gravity appears to be more mathematical than mysterious.
It’s the curvature of spacetime caused by mass and energy.
Objects don’t fall because they’re pulled; they move along bent geometry.
That’s the model, and it works.

I’m not here to replace that (I know, you’re welcome).
I’m here to ask why it feels the way it does.
Why everything in the universe, from dust to galaxies, seems to remember motion even when nothing’s visibly moving.
Why orbits persist.
Why coherence outlives chaos.

The equations describe the structure.
But they don’t explain the feel of persistence.

So let’s trade the telescope for a metaphor and see what motion leaves behind when it slows down.

The Canyon

Let’s start simple: picture a canyon.
To the eye, it appears eternal, as if it has always existed.
But it’s really an artifact of motion long gone. The slow result of water letting go of what it can’t carry.
Each grain of dirt released, each path chosen, carved the geometry we now mistake for permanence.
Erosion doesn’t create; it remembers by reshaping.

Gravity, to me, behaves like that memory.
Not because it erodes or removes anything, but because it keeps the trace of motion that once passed through.
The geometry of spacetime is the universe’s way of staying consistent after so much has already moved.

I’m not saying gravity is erosion.
I’m saying erosion shows us how motion becomes form and how history leaves behind shape.

The Shape of Motion

Take Einstein’s field equation (don’t worry, I’m not trying to go there with it):

$${\displaystyle \begin{array}{c}{G}_{\mu \nu }=\frac{8\pi G}{c^4}{T}_{\mu \nu }\end{array}}$$

The geometry of spacetime on the left responds to the energy and momentum on the right.
Matter and energy don’t “pull,” they redefine what a straight line even means.
When we watch a planet orbit, we’re seeing it follow the simplest path through curved space.

But what fascinates me is that curvature doesn’t just describe motion, it remembers it.
Long after collisions, explosions, and radiation have faded away, the geometry just… stays bent.
That’s coherence in structure persisting after chaos.

Physics calls it conservation of momentum.
I call it memory in motion: the tendency of the universe to preserve pattern even as it forgets the details of it.

And in both physics and language, forgetting is a form of compression.
A system can’t track every microstate, so it folds them into structure.
Curvature might be the universe’s cleanest form of bookkeeping.

The Dark and the Hidden

We label what we can’t yet see as dark: dark matter, dark energy. Placeholders for information our instruments haven’t retrieved.
Dark matter acts like missing mass, while dark energy acts like missing explanation.
Both remind us that unseen structure still shapes what remains.

This is where structured forgetting enters.
To me, every physical law is a compression rule (general relativity included).
When a system can’t carry the full informational detail of all its interactions, it keeps the patterns that matter most: continuity and coherence.
Spacetime geometry is that summary.
What we call gravity is the visible consistency that remains after the universe has averaged out what it can’t explicitly “remember” (again, you’ll have to read the other pieces to know what I mean by this).

Darkness, in that sense, isn’t absence.
It’s efficiency. It’s the universe streamlining itself through selective forgetting.

Why We Feel It

We don’t experience curvature.
We experience weight — our bodies pressing into the Earth.
That feeling is the interface between geometry and embodiment: the local sensation of a global structure.
It’s the canyon, but from the inside.
The ground pressing back is the universe enforcing consistency.

If you zoom in far enough, the same principle appears everywhere.
Atoms bound in lattices.
Planets locked in orbits.
Even neurons stabilizing patterns they can no longer compute in full.
Each is a kind of internal gravity — a way of preserving coherence after losing access to total information (and all that comes with it).

That’s what I mean when I say structured forgetting.
The universe never stops compressing what it can’t carry, and that compression becomes stability, form, and (sometimes) feeling.

The Shared Field

When you pull the camera back, the pattern repeats.
Systems stay coherent by remembering just enough and forgetting the rest.
Galaxies do it.
Cells do it.
So do we.

Our identities orbit around familiar anchors (such as habits, memories, and ideas) because they stabilize the “geometry” of who we are.
We forget enough to keep moving. We remember enough to stay ourselves.

It’s the same process, scaled down: information loss producing curvature, curvature maintaining coherence.
Whether in spacetime or psychology, the principle holds.

In Closing

Gravity doesn’t defy physics; it is physics doing what it always does: conserving coherence when detail exceeds capacity.
Mass–energy curves spacetime; spacetime tells mass how to move.
Within that feedback, the universe maintains the memory of motion.

Maybe that’s why the sky still holds its shape even as everything drifts apart.
Why galaxies remember how to stay together. Why we do, too.

None of this rewrites general relativity.
It’s just another way of noticing the same principle.

Empathy Collapse

This one is about empathy. Or more accurately, the loss of it (context clues, right?).

I’ve been watching how tone has become a kind of moral technology: the way we prove we’re safe and reasonable to others.
Online, at work, private conversations, even in our own minds — tone carries more weight than truth.

We no longer listen for meaning; we listen for formatting.
Say something “wrong,” and the entire context disappears as the words collapse into reputation.

I wrote a paper about it (Tonal Surveillance and Structured Forgetting), but this is the simpler version.

What I’m trying to show is how Structured Forgetting doesn’t just apply to physics or memory or information systems.
It applies to people.
It applies to us.

Empathy collapses when the cost of sounding wrong outweighs the desire to be understood.

Tone as Moral Infrastructure

We’ve built social systems that run on tone.
You can say something kind in the wrong tone and lose credibility, or say something cruel in the right tone and be rewarded for “grace.”
It’s backwards, but it’s efficient: tone is faster to scan than context.
Algorithms read it, bosses grade it, followers react to it.

And efficiency always wins.

Every system (biological, mechanical, social, and otherwise) trends toward the same goal: reduce uncertainty and spend less energy.
Physicists call it free energy minimization. I just call it the math of survival (or math of persistence for the cringing physicists out there).
The less a system has to process, the longer it lasts.

So we adapt.
We start managing tone the way we manage image.
We pre-edit the idea of “feeling” itself to survive interpretation.
That’s structured forgetting again — dressed up as anticipatory erasure.
We learn to sound empathetic before we remember how to feel empathetic.

The Strange Mirror

I notice it in my own work.
If I write something directly (without any preface or clarification for speaking), it lands differently than when I soften the tone.
Sometimes readers engage more with the softened version.
Sometimes they engage less.
And I catch myself doing the same thing: revising my own tone to make the idea easier to receive to myself.

That’s the paradox I’m studying while living inside it.
Tone influences perception — even mine, with my own words.

When I change tone, I change how real the thought feels.
It’s humbling (and a little unsettling) to see how tone can make truth feel safe or dangerous — how it can gatekeep the meaning of actual content.

Empathy as Simulation

The modern world rewards performative empathy.
But that’s empathy as simulation and not connection.

When tone becomes the ticket to being heard, sincerity turns into risk management.
You don’t share to connect; you share to stay legible for your environment.
And over time, legibility replaces presence.

That’s empathy collapse.
We sound like we care.
We just stop remembering how that feels.

Even writing this, I know I’m probably irritating the real scientists—those with grants, labs, and journals.
I don’t have the credentials stamped on my forehead.
I’m not supposed to use these terms, or reference those studies, or think across that lane without paying tuition and being knighted first.
To be “taken seriously,” I’d have to pick a single discipline, flatten my language, and format myself to look like I’m doing a proper kind of work.

Say it the right way, cite it the right way, be visibly sanctioned — and only then am I allowed to talk about the ideas that, ironically, exist ONLY because those scientists did the work that made my worldview possible. The same scientists whose work I'm celebrating may dismiss me for celebrating it incorrectly.

So the content risks being lost before it’s even heard.
My worldview, being an outright celebration of all science, interaction, and experience, is lost in the void of “get a load of this guy.”

That’s performative empathy at the academic level: people nodding politely at “interdisciplinary” until someone actually does it.
They’ll never tell you your idea is too threatening; they’ll just decide it’s “too all over the place” or “not meaningful.”
They’ll smile, forward the email, and wait for you to disappear.

You’re allowed to celebrate their research, but not to synthesize it; allowed to admire the thermodynamics, but not to say out loud that everything returns to it.
The performance of listening remains.
The actual listening never starts.

It sounds like: “They are giving me advice on how to proceed and engage in learning more about science.”
It feels like: “I need to pay my dues before I can actually contribute my (seemingly useless) pontifications.”
It looks like: “I am graciously being humored as another naive hobbyist.“

Which one wins when viewed externally?

Or does the tone of bitterness brand me as someone who is not mature enough to ask this question (thus, saving you the energy of having to engage with an answer)?

What I’m Trying to Understand

If tone can govern empathy, and empathy governs trust, then tone has become an invisible layer of governance. It’s the new emotional constitution of the modern world.

That’s what I’m working on.

The physics of forgetting scaled to emotion.
How systems, people, and even words lose access to what they meant, yet keep performing as if they remember.
Structured forgetting, empathy collapse, tonal surveillance… they’re all the same pattern.

Different levels, same entropy.