This occuring spontaneously would indeed violate the 2nd law.

It's not spontaneous...

It's happening in cba order rather abc.

Conservation of energy mate, whether it's energy or mass, it's not going anywhere.

So in a contained universe, it doesn't matter if it's an apple releasing energy and becoming a pile of ash, or a pile of ash absorbing energy and becoming a perfectly normal apple.

The net energy is still conserved. Just going from energy to mass unlike mass to energy.

Like, think of it as a seed becoming a tree. Mass is being "created" from energy.

But the laws of thermodynamics as were used to them are predicated on a linear one direction passage of time, because humans are the ones who explained it, and that's the only reality our conscious minds can comprehend

If what I'm saying doesn't make sense, it's because this is ridiculously complicated. Any flaws are because of me trying to explain it which is why I said if someone wants to understand more, they're going to have to spend a lot of time reading some really heavy scientific literature.

I feel it also warrants stating that Penrose’s theory is not widely accepted, has yet to be tested, and is based mostly on an argument to elegance - it “seems weird” for their to be uncountably infinite parallel timelines spawning at every instant. It is far too soon for it to be taken as fact.

You're talking more about Penroses further hypothesis that consciousness is because of quantum collapse inside of the brain. That is where challenges arise.

But Penrose is smart enough to say he doesn't know everything, and he has spent decades talking about this stuff in the scientific community because he wants it challenged. That's kind of how science works....