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:
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.
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.