Dr. Seguin,
Your essay captures not only the flavor of many modern attempts to understand existence and humanity's role therein; it also admirably admits potential inadequacies of the endeavor as it presently stands:
"Could the dead-ends we have been encountering over the past decades in fundamental physics (the failure to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the proliferation of solutions in the landscape of M-theory) be interpreted as signs that we are nearing the edge of our patch of lawfulness in the space of all possibilities?"
With hopes of transcending this arguably confused and desperate state, you have expressed the benefits of "extending the notion of causality to include both directions of time," and how this is compatible with the Lagrangian formulation of physics.
Curiously, there exists a vast, accessible, yet unexplored regime of physical reality where this formulation has not been tested. If this is true, then is it not advisable to probe this regime to find out whether or not the "dead-ends" to our "patch of lawfulness" have been needlessly self-imposed?
The worthiness of the long-standing goal of unifying quantum theory with general relativity (GR) clearly depends on the independent worthiness of both theories. Though GR is often lauded as having been well-tested on scales from mm to the Solar System, the vast untested regime--alluded to above--spans this whole range because it is represented by the INSIDE of any given body of matter. The Schwarzschild INTERIOR solution predicts that clock rates decrease inside matter to a central minimum. A direct test of this prediction is not practical, but a convincing indirect test has been feasible for decades.
The Newtonian (kinematic) counterpart for the clock rate prediction is the temporally reversible oscillation of a test object through the center. Galileo proposed the experiment in 1632. It could be done in an Earth-based laboratory or an orbiting satellite, but it has not yet been done.
The seemingly reasonable assumption that the Lagrangian formulation of physics applies to this unexplored regime gives confidence in the further assumption that the result of the experiment--even though it has never been done--is well known. In fact, it is not known at all. Until the experiment is actually carried out, we could reasonably argue (e.g., by symmetry) that inside matter, the rates of clocks actually increase to a central MAXIMUM. If this is true, the test object would not pass the center. Its path would be patently IRREVERSIBLE, indicating a failure of the Lagrangian formulation and discovery of the essence of time's unidirectionality.
If the experiment supports the latter prediction, then much of what you assume to be relevant for the problem of consciousness will actually turn out to be irrelevant.
Therefore, please consider the arguments presented in my essay, Rethinking the Universe, which urges fulfilling Galileo's proposal and pursues this line of thought to its cosmological consequences.
Thank you.
Richard Benish