Research Program / Claims / physical-time-4

Physical time is a human invention; animals are completely ignorant of it, and physical time is not related to the individual's specific level.

物理时间是人类发明，动物对此浑然不知，且物理时间并不与个人的特定层面相关。

Concept physical time · Domain Nonlinear Time and Self-Cognition · ontological claim · 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 3: approximately 48 rats and 120 humans complete matched temporal bisection tasks, e.g., learning 2 s and 8 s standards and then judging intermediate durations. Rats are trained for 6–10 weeks; humans undergo 2–3 test sessions over about 4 months. Psychometric curves, bisection points, Weber ratios, and cross-stimulus transfer are compared, controlling for reward, motivation, sensory ability, and counting strategies; animal performance significantly above chance suffices to refute the operational version of 'completely lacking duration discrimination.'
Suggested paper title
Cross-Species Interval Timing in Rats and Humans: A Pre-registered Temporal Bisection Study
What it would overturn
If animals indeed cannot represent time at all, this would overturn the conclusion, supported by behavioral and neural evidence, that non-human animals possess duration and temporal-order processing abilities.
Candidate labs / funders
Ehsan Arabzadeh; Joseph J. Paton，Champalimaud Foundation; Dean V. Buonomano，University of California, Los Angeles
Specificity of Seth's formulation
'Animals are completely ignorant' is, in the usual time-processing sense, a clear prediction already counter-evidenced; if it only means animals do not understand human calendars, the claim weakens to a different problem and cannot support that physical time is human-made.
Note
Temporal bisection tasks test time-processing ability but cannot alone demonstrate that animals possess time consciousness identical to humans; 'individual-specific level' has no operational definition and remains unassessable.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Temporal order judgment of multisensory stimuli in rat and human — Fatemeh Mafi、Matthew F. Tang、Mohammad Reza Afarinesh、Sadegh Ghasemian、Vahid Sheibani、Ehsan Arabzadeh (2023), Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
    大鼠和人均能辨别视听刺激先后，大鼠在部分短间隔条件下表现更好，反驳动物完全不处理时间信息的解释。[论文](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2022.1070452/full)
  • The Neural Basis of Timing: Distributed Mechanisms for Diverse Functions — Joseph J. Paton、Dean V. Buonomano (2018), Neuron
    综述多种动物中的计时行为和神经机制，表明时间加工不依赖人类的钟表制度。[论文](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29772201/)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim physical-time-4, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/physical-time-4