29 DEC 2025
David asks: is time just sampling rate
time-as-container felt wrong; the alternative was time as relative sampling speed.
the time question was an attempt to reframe time as a relationship between systems, not a container that events sit inside.
the idea was that a subsystem experiences time according to how often it samples environmental state compared with how fast that environment changes.
Time is not a container things happen "in." It's purely a description of the relative rate at which a subsystem samples environmental states compared to the rate at which those states change.
the next step was recursive: even without new external input, internal layers can sample previous internal states. that makes consciousness and time feel like related descriptions of update-rate from different levels.