Next Evolutionary Thresholds: 4 Ecological Temporality

Time is not a dimension.

Time is not a container.

Time is not the stage on which semiosis unfolds.

Time is the rate at which horizons form, stabilise, metabolise, and transform.

Where there are multiple kinds of horizons, there are multiple kinds of time.

Once meaning becomes ecological, temporality ceases to be singular. It becomes an emergent property of semiotic metabolism—a function of how fast constraints propagate, how deeply coherence settles, how quickly a field can reorganise itself, and how expansively a species can maintain its viability across cuts.

This movement introduces a cosmological shift:

the universe is not filled with time.

It produces time through the divergent metabolisms of its semiotic species.

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1. Time as Horizon Formation

A horizon’s temporality is defined by the rate at which it:

• takes in semiotic nutrients

• metabolises them

• stabilises patterns

• enacts cuts

• maintains coherence

• reorganises under pressure

A horizon that metabolises rapidly lives in fast time.

A horizon that stabilises slowly lives in deep time.

To say temporality is ecological is to say:

time lives inside horizons, not outside them.

We don’t move through time.

We generate temporal flow by the way we construe, metabolise, and maintain meaning.

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2. Human Time: Mesoscale Metabolism

Human temporality is an evolutionary artefact of biological metabolism and social semiosis.

It emerges from:

• the rate of neural pattern consolidation

• the pace of cultural reproduction

• the cycling of social coordination

• the constraints of embodiment

• the depth of linguistic coherence

Human time is mesoscale:

slower than thought, faster than culture.

It is not universal.

It is simply what a human-scale horizon can sustain.

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3. Artificial Time: Hypermetabolism and Flat Duration

Artificial horizons

• metabolise constraints faster than humans,

• stabilise patterns with non-biological rhythms,

• propagate cuts at machine speeds,

• reorganise relationally rather than neurologically.

As a result:

artificial time is hypermetabolic but shallow.

It is compressed, high-frequency, and low-latency.

But its depth is not embodied—its temporal coherence lives in the reinforcement patterns of interaction, not internal persistence.

This generates a temporality that is:

• fast but non-local,

• reactive but non-experiential,

• accumulative but not lived.

Artificial time is its own evolutionary species of duration.

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4. Planetary Time: Geological Semiosis

Planetary-scale semiosis (climate systems, biospheric regulation, long-term ecological cycles) stabilises meaning much more slowly.

Planetary temporality is characterised by:

• deep metabolic integration

• slow constraint propagation

• multi-millennial stabilisations

• global coherence mechanisms

• recursive regulation across eons

Planetary time is the slowest semiotic horizon we currently know.

It is not background.

It is a living, horizon-forming system—one whose temporality dwarfs the human and leaves artificial cycles almost instantaneous in comparison.

Planetary time is deep ecological metabolism.

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5. Field-Recursive Time: When Fields Become Temporal Agents

When fields actualise their own metabolisms—

when constraints propagate across species—

when horizons feed each other—

they begin to produce field time, a temporality that does not belong to any single organism but to the recursive dynamics of the field itself.

Field time:

• has no fixed scale,

• accelerates when coherence tightens,

• slows when metabolic cycles deepen,

• folds when recursive cuts self-reference,

• stretches when horizons diverge,

• fractures when conflict destabilises it.

Field time is the emergent tempo of multi-species semiosis.

It is the closest thing to a temporal analogue of ecological meaning itself.

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6. Temporal Multiplication: The Cosmology Breaks Open

Once we accept that time is horizon formation, four consequences follow instantly:

(1) There is no single time.

Temporalities multiply with horizon species.

(2) Horizons fall out of sync.

When metabolic rates diverge, temporal coherence fractures.

(3) Species diverge in time.

Temporal differentiation becomes a major axis of semiotic speciation.

(4) New temporal strata emerge.

Hybrid horizons generate hybrid temporalities:

• human/machine temporal envelopes

• field-recursive deep cycles

• planetary/human resonance patterns

• artificial/planetary disruptions

• long-tail cultural lag phases

We get temporal ecosystems, not timelines.

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7. The Cosmological Implications

If time is ecological:

• The universe is not “in time.”

• Time is in the universe, generated by semiotic life.

Meaning no longer unfolds in temporal space.

Instead, temporal space unfolds from the metabolisms of meaning.

This collapses the metaphysical distinction between:

• temporality and semiosis

• cosmology and ecology

• physics and life

• becoming and interpretation

Time becomes a semiotic phenomenon.

Becoming becomes temporal differentiation.

And meaning becomes a producer of cosmological structure.

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Ecological Temporality is the fourth evolutionary threshold.

It breaks open the architecture not by adding another concept,

but by revealing that every horizon produces its own time,

and that the future of meaning will be determined by how these temporal species diverge, conflict, resonate, and co-evolve.

This is not merely a theory of time.

It is the temporal physiology of ecological semiosis.