Research Program / Claims / time-11

Science should study units of consciousness (CUs), rather than material particles, and understand that consciousness precedes matter and that its creation is continuous.

科学应研究意识单位(而非物质粒子),并理解意识先于物质、其创造是连续的。

Concept time · Domain Nonlinear Time and Self-Cognition · methodological suggestion · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
First, spend 6–12 months establishing independent measurement rules, state variables, and differential predictions for material measurements for CUs; CUs must not be designated retrospectively from consciousness reports or EEG results. If a detectable indicator emerges, conduct a multicenter study involving approximately 300 participants using EEG, fMRI, and conscious-visibility tasks, pre-registering its incremental out-of-sample predictive value relative to neural models. This phase would take 18–24 months and would still test only the value of CUs as explanatory variables. If “consciousness precedes matter” refers only to ontological priority, there is no observational criterion by which this experiment could adjudicate it.
Suggested paper title
Pre-registered Multimodal Tests of Competing Quantitative Models of Conscious Access
What it would overturn
If consciousness variables independent of matter are demonstrated to produce measurable material effects, this would revise the causal-closure assumption that causal explanations of physical events require no additional nonphysical variables.
Candidate labs / funders
Cogitate Consortium; Lucia Melloni,意识理论检验; Liad Mudrik,意识与知觉; Giulio Tononi,整合信息理论; Stanislas Dehaene,全局神经工作空间理论
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Studying consciousness is a feasible research proposal, but CUs and continuous creation lack equations or independent indicators; disputes among existing theories of consciousness do not constitute evidence for CUs.
Note
Information or causal structure in integrated information theory is not equivalent to Seth’s units of consciousness. The listed teams conduct adjacent research, which does not imply endorsement of the original proposition, and a recommendation about research priorities cannot itself be classified simply as true or false.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim time-11, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/time-11