Consciousness as a Bidirectional Free Energy Minimizer: Geodesic Navigation, Prospective Assembly, and the Geometry of Civilizational Survival

The fundamental equations of physics are time-symmetric. Biological systems, however, evolved inside that time-symmetric geometry. We propose that this is not incidental: if spacetime equations permit information to propagate in both temporal directions, then a biological system optimized by evolution should exhibit bidirectional free energy minimization — integrating causal history forward and receiving attractor information backward. This extends Friston's Active Inference framework temporally and generates a novel quantity: the Prospective Assembly Index A(x-hat), the forward-facing complement to Assembly Theory's causal index. We further propose that the measurable consequence of bidirectional navigation at civilizational scale is dPhi/dt — the rate of change of future life-generating capacity — distinguishing light gravity trajectories (dPhi/dt >= 0) from dark gravity trajectories (dPhi/dt < 0). Three historical collapse cases provide consistency checks. We argue that consciousness is not merely an observer of geodesics but a navigator of them, and that this reframing has both formal and empirical consequences for Earth system science, complex adaptive systems theory, and the physics of living systems.