Research Program / Claims / physical-time-6

Measurement of physical time is essentially measurement of the intensity of electrical pulses; the division into past, present, and future is determined by pulse intensity.

对物理时间的测量本质上是对电性脉冲强度的测量，过去、现在、未来的划分由脉冲强度决定。

Concept physical time · Domain Nonlinear Time and Self-Cognition · testable prediction · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contradicted

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Corresponds to supplementary question 1: about 150 participants undergo EEG, 60 of whom also undergo fMRI, across 3 test sessions completing duration bisection, temporal-order judgments, past-event recall, and future-event imagination; objective duration and stimulus intensity are orthogonally manipulated, controlling for arousal, attention, and confidence. Pre-registered comparisons of amplitude univariate models, oscillatory phase models, and population state trajectory models in cross-task prediction performance over 6–9 months. If direct neural pulse testing is required, unit recording in ~20–30 animals is additionally conducted; the physical chronometer version can vary readout signal amplitude at fixed frequency to test whether timing changes after correcting for measurement error.
Suggested paper title
Neural Signal Amplitude Versus Population Dynamics in Duration and Temporal-Order Judgments
What it would overturn
If intensity alone determines physical duration and temporal labels, this would overturn the hypothesis that 'timing must preserve frequency, phase, or state-evolution information; signal intensity alone is insufficient to determine time.'
Candidate labs / funders
Dean V. Buonomano，University of California, Los Angeles; Joseph J. Paton，Champalimaud Foundation; Andrew D. Ludlow，National Institute of Standards and Technology
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Intensity rather than moment' is potentially distinguishable, but it must first specify whether intensity refers to single action-potential amplitude, firing rate, population synchrony, or field-potential power, and the mapping from intensity to temporal labels.
Note
EEG amplitude does not equal single-neuron pulse intensity, and fMRI BOLD is an even more indirect hemodynamic measure; finding amplitude correlations neither proves a unique mechanism nor allows extrapolating subjective timing results to physical time laws.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Optical atomic clocks — Andrew D. Ludlow、Martin M. Boyd、Jun Ye、Ekkehard Peik、Piet O. Schmidt (2015), Reviews of Modern Physics
    原子钟以原子跃迁频率为基准进行计时，不能将时间测量普遍等同于电性脉冲振幅测量。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.87.637)
  • The Neural Basis of Timing: Distributed Mechanisms for Diverse Functions — Joseph J. Paton、Dean V. Buonomano (2018), Neuron
    神经计时涉及群体活动随时间的变化等多种机制，未建立仅由脉冲强度决定过去、现在和未来的通则。[论文](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29772201/)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim physical-time-6, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/physical-time-6