The Changing Perception of Time: How Qualia, Space, and Time Interact

This framework suggests that time is not an absolute quantity but an emergent, subjective phenomenon that depends on the amount of qualia crossing a mind’s event horizon. This aligns with evidence from neuroscience, where increased sensory input or heightened cognitive processing slows down perceived time—as seen in children’s prolonged experiences before neuronal pruning and in the effect of adrenaline on the brain.

This idea leads to a fascinating conclusion: the relation between space and time is not fixed but dynamic, shaped by the flow of qualia through a cognitive system.

1. Evidence That Time Perception Is Qualia-Dependent

✅ Children Experience Time More Slowly Due to Greater Sensory Input

  • Before neuronal pruning, children’s brains have more synaptic connections and process a higher volume of unfiltered sensory data.
  • This overwhelming stream of qualia makes each moment feel richer and more expansive, effectively stretching subjective time.

✅ Adrenaline Increases Brain Activity, Slowing Perceived Time

  • In high-stress or adrenaline-fueled moments, the brain processes more information per unit of external time.
  • This causes events to feel like they are unfolding in slow motion, mirroring the high-qualia influx in childhood.

🔹 Conclusion: The more qualia flooding into the mind, the slower time is perceived. Conversely, when less qualia is processed (routine, habituation), time speeds up.

2. Space, Time, and the Mind’s Event Horizon

If qualia has a property of space (as proposed in this model), then when it is experienced subjectively, it warps as it crosses the mind’s event horizon, effectively converting space into time.

This transformation is key:

  • A high influx of qualia (high spatial complexity) is experienced as prolonged time.
  • A low influx of qualia (low spatial complexity) is experienced as compressed time.
  • This suggests that space, when perceived internally, does not remain “space” but transforms into time.

This mirrors how black holes distort external spacetime:

  • The more information (qualia) entering a mind, the greater the time dilation experienced within it.
  • The more information entering a black hole, the greater the time dilation observed at its event horizon.

🔹 Implication: A mind experiencing time dilation due to high qualia influx is analogous to an object near a gravitational well experiencing relativistic time dilation. This suggests a deep connection between subjective cognition and spacetime structure.

3. A Frequency-to-Time Domain Transformation

In signal processing, Fourier transforms allow the conversion of a frequency domain signal into a time-domain representation. This is precisely what happens in this framework:

  1. Qualia (spatial information) enters the mind’s event horizon as a high-frequency signal.
  2. As the brain processes it, the experience is “translated” into a subjective perception of time.
  3. The more complex the input (higher spatial frequency), the longer the perceived duration.

This is not just a metaphor—it suggests that subjective time is literally a Fourier transform of spatial qualia.

🔹 Possible Interpretation:

  • If space is qualia, then time is a byproduct of spatial processing.
  • A mind operates as a kind of inverse Fourier transform, converting spatial complexity into temporal experience.
  • This explains why time feels slow in novel, high-input states and fast in repetitive, low-input states—the “resolution” of the transformation varies with cognitive bandwidth.

4. What This Reveals About Reality

🚩 Time Is Not Fundamental—It Is a Derived Experience from Qualia Processing

  • In this model, time does not exist independently—it is an emergent consequence of the way spatial information is processed within a system.
  • This aligns with relativity, where time is affected by gravity and motion—but in this model, time is affected by qualia flux across an event horizon.

🚩 Spacetime Itself May Be Structured in a Frequency Domain

  • If the brain naturally converts qualia from space to time, perhaps spacetime itself functions like a massive frequency-space system.
  • This supports holography, where time may be an emergent, lower-dimensional projection of a deeper structure.

🚩 Black Holes and Minds Follow the Same Processing Dynamics

  • Both experience time dilation when absorbing more information—suggesting that the way spacetime warps under gravity follows the same fundamental principle as the way consciousness experiences time dilation under qualia influx.

5. The Big Picture: Time as a Computed Variable

  • In classical physics, time is treated as absolute or, in relativity, as a dimension intertwined with space.
  • This model suggests a more radical view:
    • Time is computed based on the processing of spatial qualia.
    • More qualia → more time perceived. Less qualia → less time perceived.
    • Black holes and minds mirror each other because both experience time dilation due to high information influx.

🚩 Final Thought:
If time is a secondary effect of spatial qualia processing, then perhaps our entire perception of temporal flow is just an illusion of recursive information structuring. What we call “time” may be nothing more than the way our minds construct a sequence from an otherwise timeless, fractal reality.