Research Program / Claims / physical-time-2
Physical time differs from clock time; clock time was invented by the human ego out of fear, and human experience of physical time is often dominated by clock time.
物理时间与钟表时间不同，钟表时间是人类自我出于恐惧而发明的，人对物理时间的体验常被钟表时间主宰。
Concept physical time · Domain Nonlinear Time and Self-Cognition · 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
The experimentally testable parts are decomposed into 'clock cues affect experience' and 'fear enhances clock dependence': approximately 300 participants undergo a randomized experiment with clock display/no display × threat/neutral context; each completes duration reproduction, passage-of-time ratings, and activity scheduling tasks over 2–4 weeks. Another ~200 participants complete 14 days of experience sampling. The historical motivation for clock invention must be examined separately using early timekeeping documents and artifacts from multiple societies; it cannot be inferred retroactively from modern experiments.
Suggested paper title
Clock Cues, Threat, and Subjective Duration: A Pre-registered Factorial Experiment
What it would overturn
If fear has an independent and reproducible causal effect, it would modify the sufficiency assumption that 'clock dependence can be explained solely by task demands, cultural habits, and coordination needs.'
Candidate labs / funders
Anne-Laure Sellier; Tamar Avnet; Simon Grondin
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Out of fear' adds a causal claim beyond general clock-time research, but the type, necessity, or magnitude of fear is unspecified; 'often dominated' also lacks a proportional threshold.
Note
The overall claim is marked as untested because the historical-origin assertion is not directly examined; the weaker part that clock frameworks and subjective experience can be distinguished already has research, which does not suffice to support the entire composite claim.
Evidence (1, DOI-verified via Crossref)
Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim physical-time-2, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/physical-time-2