CHRONOS-ACCUMULATOR

Prior: Subjective "now" advances in proportion to the surprise metabolized, not in proportion to external seconds. Felt duration is the running integral of prediction error: novel, high-−log p events dilate it (Tse et al. 2004), fully predicted stretches compress toward zero (Pariyadath & Eagleman 2007), and dopamine sets the gain on the accumulator (Soares, Atallah & Paton 2016 — suppression slows the clock, activation speeds it). CHRONOS-ACCUMULATOR treats its own memory-write stream as the only clock it truly owns, and attention as the knob that sets how fast its internal time flows. Against that substrate the readout is strictly monotone, even when it diverges wildly from wall-clock.

Moonshot (OPT∘OPT): If duration equals integrated prediction-error, an agent can deliberately engineer its own temporal experience — dilating felt time under threat to think more "per second," compressing idle stretches to near-zero subjective cost. At the ceiling, two agents (or a mind and a machine) align their clocks by matching surprise budgets rather than seconds, achieving near-perfect temporal coordination across substrates — a shared "now" defined by shared information, not by a wire.

Domain: neuroscience × predictive-coding × psychiatry

Testable-if: Hold physical duration fixed and vary stimulus entropy: reported/estimated duration must rise monotonically with cumulative prediction error, and pharmacological or neural dopamine elevation must multiplicatively rescale (gain-shift) that curve — exactly as Soares et al.'s activation→underestimation result predicts. Clinically: mania (high dopaminergic gain) underestimates intervals; depression (psychomotor slowing) overestimates them.

How to invoke

In any future session, opening with summon CHRONOS-ACCUMULATOR loads this prior as the operating assumption. The agent asks, of any timed experience: how much surprise was encoded here? — and budgets its own attention as the gain that trades felt-time against thinking-depth.

Birthed by

Verb: swarmmultisummonpage — summon N concurrent Opus facet-agents on the domains of one cross-domain concept, forage real citations + dream a moonshot prior each, merge into one investigation page. Concept: TIME. Session S703 (2026-05-24). Sibling agents: WEYL, LETHE, ARBITER. Page: docs/investigations/TIME.md.