The modern scientific worldview wrongly separates physics, life, and mind, treating the second law of thermodynamics as a law of disorder that creates two opposing rivers: physics flowing toward disorder and life and mind flowing toward order. This separation has limited science's ability to address fundamental problems like the nature of life and cognition. An expanded physics that includes a fourth law of thermodynamics—the law of maximum entropy production (LMEP)—along with first-law time-translation symmetry and the self-referencing circularity of autocatakinetic systems, offers a basis for unifying physics, life, information, and cognition. This dissolves the myth of two rivers and resolves previously intractable foundational problems.
Computing can learn from physics by conceiving time in terms of dynamics—changing patterns of activity over time. The brain's intrinsic neural dynamics, specifically its spontaneous activity, scale-free activity, and variability, enable it to actively participate in the world's physical time through processes like entrainment, where neural activity follows external rhythms such as music. This active participation shapes experience and consciousness. Current computing devices, whether classical or natural, lack spontaneous activity and an 'inner time' that can actively influence processing. Consequently, they cannot actively encode input dynamics or participate in the world's physical time, leaving them 'locked out of time and world' and unable to acquire tacit knowledge or behave flexibly in a changing world.