Research Program / Claims / psychological-time-4
In Seth’s nonphysical environment, time is experienced in terms of experiential intensity, with peaks and troughs, and can be likened to continually changing walls.
在赛斯的非物理环境中，时间以经验强度体验，具有高峰与低谷，可类比为不断变化的墙壁。
Concept psychological time · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · ontological claim · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status untested · ★ fundable
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
A weaker, testable version is that “experiential intensity makes an independent contribution to duration judgments.” Approximately 240 adults would undergo orthogonal manipulations of emotional arousal, event density, and actual duration, with psychological time practice compared against an active control. Pupillary measures, skin conductance, duration estimates, the sense of time passing, and reports of event boundaries would be recorded. Each participant would complete four experiments, and the project would take 6–9 months. Pre-registered model comparisons would test whether intensity variables improve prediction beyond attention, memory, and arousal. There remains no paradigm for adjudicating the nonphysical environment itself.
Suggested paper title
Experiential Intensity and Subjective Duration Beyond Arousal and Event Density
What it would overturn
Only if experiential intensity provides independent predictive value that existing variables cannot explain would the specific model that attention, arousal, and event memory suffice to explain temporal judgments in this task require revision.
Candidate labs / funders
Sylvie Droit-Volet；Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive; Kevin S. LaBar；情绪与认知神经科学研究
Specificity of Seth's formulation
“Peaks,” “troughs,” and “walls” are phenomenological metaphors that specify no functional relationship between intensity and duration, and therefore currently yield no distinguishing predictions beyond existing models of emotion and timing.
Note
An intense experience may be accompanied both by the feeling that “time passes quickly” and by the impression that “it seems very long in retrospect.” The immediate sense of time passing and retrospective duration must therefore be measured separately.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim psychological-time-4, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/psychological-time-4