Complex Objects Carry Their Causal History as Physical Size in Time

One of assembly theory's most radical claims is that time is not merely a dimension through which objects travel but a material property that complex objects measurably possess. The assembly index — the minimum number of recursive joining operations required to construct an object from elementary building blocks — is intrinsic to the object itself. The same molecule yields the same index whether synthesized on Earth or discovered on Enceladus. This means complex objects carry their causal history as a kind of physical extent in time, analogous to spatial size. Emergence, on this account, is neither mystical nor observer-dependent: it is a direct reflection of how much evolutionary selection and combinatorial exploration is embedded in an object's structure.

The framework dissolves the apparent Ontological Gap between matter and information by relativizing it to the observer's own temporal depth. Objects with assembly indices larger than ours — institutions, languages, cultural systems — appear abstract and informational precisely because we are embedded within the causal architecture that produced them. Objects with smaller indices appear straightforwardly physical. This asymmetry is a perceptual artifact of our position inside the biosphere's vast Causal Structure, not a fundamental division in nature.

This perspective also offers a deflationary resolution to the hard problem of life. Information exerting causal power over matter ceases to be a mysterious emergent phenomenon once one accepts that "information" simply names what objects physically large in time do when they constrain and select among objects smaller in time. Causation flows along the axis of temporal depth, and life is what physics looks like when that depth becomes sufficiently large to sustain open-ended selection.