The Completeness Model: Life–Death Complementarity as the Structure of Temporal Experience

The Completeness Model is a multi-level interpretive framework for temporal experience. It proposes that experienced time consists of static configurations (“life”) already paired with null intervals (“death”), so that continuity arises as the synthetic effect of their succession rather than as a primitive medium. The model distinguishes three graded levels of claim: (1) a phenomenological description grounded in interoceptive awareness of cardiac and respiratory pauses; (2) an effective dynamical realisation through successive decoherence events, quantum Zeno interventions and open-system resets; and (3) a speculative compatibility with discrete-spacetime approaches such as causal set theory. No modification of unitary quantum mechanics is introduced. The contribution is organisational and conceptual: the model brings interoceptive neuroscience, quantum measurement theory and discrete-spacetime ideas into a single coherent scheme, supplies an explicit formal language for the life–death alternation, and generates concrete, falsifiable predictions about the effect of attention to bodily pauses on duration perception and the sense of temporal continuity. Limitations, especially the timescale gap between neural and decoherence processes, are stated explicitly.