Polytemporal Worlds — The Scales of Becoming: 2 Temporal Interference — When Worlds Fall Out of Sync

Temporal interference is what happens when two or more systems of becoming — each with their own tempo, rhythm, and anticipatory horizon — intersect without aligning. It’s not merely a “mismatch in timing,” but a relational phase difference: the potentials of one world become inaccessible, distorted, or inverted through the construal of another.

Every system sustains itself by maintaining a coherent relation between potential and actual — by keeping its anticipations and its materialisations in reflexive tension. But coherence at one scale can produce incoherence at another. What looks like progress from within one temporal frame may appear as decay, latency, or noise from another. Interference is thus not an error but a structural feature of multi-scale becoming.

In the relational view, “worlds” are not containers of time but temporal alignments themselves — structured rhythms of anticipation and delay. When these rhythms meet, they do not simply add; they diffract. The interference patterns that emerge constitute new orders of possibility — unstable, hybrid, often unpredictable.

This can be seen in biological, social, and symbolic systems alike:

• Biologically, metabolic and ecological timescales can slip out of sync — an organism’s internal rhythms no longer resonating with its environment’s cycles.

• Socially, institutions embody temporal orders (bureaucratic, economic, ritual) that may interfere with emergent collective tempos.

• Semiotically, symbolic systems can lock in obsolete temporal assumptions, generating dissonance between living experience and inherited meaning.

Temporal interference is thus the friction of coexistence in a polytemporal reality. It reveals that temporal coherence is never given, only negotiated. Every act of alignment entails the exclusion or compression of other rhythms — every synchrony leaves something unsynchronised.

If time is the relational medium of becoming, then interference is the trace of its multiplicity — the shimmer that shows where worlds overlap without merging.