Temporal Dissonance: Layers of Time

• Temporal Dissonance is the conflict among multiple valid time representations, spanning objective physical measures to subjective experiential perceptions.
• It manifests in physics as anti-chronological sequences and in neuroscience as a mismatch between conscious and unconscious time processing.
• In artificial systems, temporal dissonance causes catastrophic interference during knowledge updates, revealing challenges in reconciling conflicting temporal data.

Temporal dissonance denotes the phenomenon in which two or more notions, experiences, or representations of time conflict or diverge—whether at the level of physical theory, perceptual apparatus, cognitive processing, or system modeling. This concept encompasses both the explicit mismatch between subjective time and objective time and deeper ambiguities arising from the coexistence of multiple valid "layers" of temporality. Theoretical discussions of temporal dissonance span physics, cognitive neuroscience, quantum theory, philosophy of time, and even machine learning, reflecting its broad relevance across domains where time is both an observable and a construct.

1. Diverse Notions and Layers of Time

Temporal dissonance fundamentally arises from the existence of multiple, only partially overlapping conceptualizations of time. Rovelli (Rovelli, 2021) delineates "layers" such as:

• Relational time: Time defined by the ordering of events, without an external clock.
• Newtonian (absolute) time: An unchanging, universal time parameter, applying even in the absence of events.
• Relativistic time: Proper time along worldlines, with no global simultaneity.
• Cosmological time: Time since the Big Bang, assigned along particular worldlines.
• Quantum gravitational time: Absence of a preferred time variable; dynamics as conditional relations, e.g., the Wheeler-DeWitt equation ($\hat{H}\Psi = 0$).
• Thermodynamic/irreversible time: Emergent arrow of time due to entropy increase ($S = k_B \log \Omega$).
• Experiential time: The psychological sense of passage, flow, and "now."

These layers often conflict at their boundaries. For example, the block universe interpretation (relativity: all spacetime events equally real) contradicts both the experiential passage of time and thermodynamic arrows, generating persistent temporal dissonance (Ellis, 2022, Rovelli, 2021).

2. Temporal Dissonance in Physical Theory

In general relativity, global time ordering is not protected: an observer may "see" a sequence of events unfold in reverse, as demonstrated in Paranjape (Paranjape, 2020). The mechanism operates as follows:

• In flat spacetime, received signals from a clock preserve emission chronology.
• In curved spacetime (e.g., near a black hole), gravitational lensing and Shapiro time delay distort the arrival times of light signals ($t_{\rm Shapiro}(\rho_S, \rho_0)$), leading to intersection and self-intersection of null surfaces.
• At the critical photon trajectory, later light can arrive before earlier light, so the observer perceives a clock running backwards, while causality is locally maintained:

$$t+dt + t_{\rm Shapiro}(\rho_S, \rho_0(t+dt)) = t + t_{\rm Shapiro}(\rho_S, \rho_0(t)), \quad \frac{dt_{\rm Shapiro}}{dt} = -1$$

Advanced lensing geometries generically enable this phenomenon. Thus, for cosmological/astronomical observations, the temporal sequence is not an absolute, and apparent anti-chronology does not entail actual acausality.

3. Temporal Dissonance in Psychological and Cognitive Domains

In psychology and neuroscience, temporal dissonance appears as the mismatch between conscious and unconscious processing of time (Mossbridge, 2015). Experiments reveal that:

• Unconscious processes integrate information across wider time windows, sometimes anticipating future events (presentiment studies: physiological signals responding before the stimulus).
• Conscious awareness constructs a linear narrative, with strict past/present/future distinctions and a privileged "now," optimized for functional utility, not veridical accuracy.

Hoffman's evolutionary models show that agents maximizing fitness utilize utility-driven (not truth-driven) time representations, further disconnecting conscious narrative from underlying reality. Mossbridge (Mossbridge, 2015) concludes that conscious time is an adaptive, incomplete story, and that non-conscious systems access a broader, less ordered event set.

4. Quantum Temporal Dissonance and Contextuality

Quantum theory reveals a unique form of temporal dissonance: the conflict between classical realism/non-invasiveness and quantum measurement, as substantiated in experiments on Hardy's paradox and Bell inequalities in the time domain (Fedrizzi et al., 2010). Key results include:

• Temporal Hardy's paradox is stronger than spatial—the maximum value for quantum violation is $\mathcal{H}_{QM} = 0.25$, spatial maximum is $\mathcal{H}_\text{spatial} \approx 0.09$.
• State-independent violation: Temporal Bell-CHSH inequality can be violated for any quantum state—even fully mixed—distinct from spatial entanglement requirements.
• Formally, for correlation function $$C_{k,l} = \operatorname{Tr}( \rho\, \frac{1}{2}\{A_k, B_l\} )$$, the outcome does not depend on $\rho$ for appropriate measurement settings.

This demonstrates that temporal quantum correlations generate nonclassicality independent of initial state purity, exposing a fundamental temporal quantum dissonance and showing that all quantum states are temporally "entangled" under sequential measurement protocols.

5. Temporal Dissonance in Models of Decision Making

Recent work in behavioral economics adapts temporal dissonance to the context of intertemporal and risky choices (Chan et al., 25 Mar 2025). The anticipated surprise (AS) framework models the cognitive representation of future rewards subject to hazard and risk:

• Intertemporal risk is represented as probabilistic branches with possible loss at each time step.
• Time inconsistency and timing risk aversion are explained via anticipation of negative surprise at outcome resolution.
• Mental representations ("branching schemes") of combined delay and probability risks can invert or dilute each other's effect, explaining contradictory empirical findings.
• Temporal dissonance thus arises from flexible, context-dependent constructions of the future, not objective properties of delay or risk.

The mathematical form for hazard-delayed reward is: $$U_0 = q^n, \quad U = U_0 \cdot g(A), \quad g(A) = \frac{1}{1 + k_2|A|},$$ with $q = 1-p$ and $A$ as total anticipated surprise accumulated over branches.

6. Reconciling Physical and Human Time

Divergent conceptions of time between physics and human perception have been interpreted as a "Two Times Problem." Kastner (Kastner, 2023) argues that this perceived conflict is illusory:

• Quantum non-unitarity (physical wavefunction collapse) introduces an intrinsic arrow of time, refuting claims of universal time symmetry.
• Spacetime is emergent from a quantum substratum, with actualization events encoded via transactional processes.
• Conscious experience of flow and becoming parallels genuine physical processes; thus, temporal dissonance between "physical" and "human" time vanishes when quantum dynamism and emergence are properly accounted for.

Ellis (Ellis, 2022) deconstructs the block universe misconception, advocating for the evolving block universe, in which time's passage and the psychological experience thereof are context-dependent reflections of the evolving manifold ($M(t)$) and neuronal coarse-graining. Experiential time ($T_B$) is not linearly related to proper time ($t$), but the passage of time is real—misconceptions, not physics, generate apparent temporal dissonance.

7. Temporal Dissonance in Artificial Systems and Informatics

Temporal dissonance is increasingly manifest in artificial learning systems, especially LLMs undergoing continual knowledge update (Clemente et al., 5 Feb 2025). Empirical evidence points to:

• Catastrophic interference under contradictory (dissonant) updates: new facts that conflict with prior knowledge induce widespread loss of unrelated stored facts, even when update strategies target only "plastic" (unused) neurons.
• Humans naturally resist and contextualize contradictory information (cognitive dissonance), whereas LLMs indiscriminately overwrite knowledge.
• Contradictions are detectable via model-internal activation and gradient statistics (SVM classification accuracy ≈ 95–99%), suggesting potential for protective or conflict-aware architectures.

This suggests a profound limitation in current neural systems: an inability to compartmentalize temporal or logical dissonance, with destructive consequences unlike those in human cognition.

Table: Manifestations of Temporal Dissonance Across Domains

Domain	Source of Dissonance	Observable Consequence
Physics	Null surface intersections, lensing	Apparent anti-chronological sequences
Neuroscience	Conscious vs. unconscious processing	Mismatch in time window, anticipation
Quantum Theory	Sequential measurement, contextuality	State-independent paradox violation
Decision Theory	Framing, branching representation	Time-inconsistent preferences
Informatics	Contradictory updates, lack of context	Catastrophic knowledge interference

Conclusion

Temporal dissonance is not a fundamental flaw in physical law or cognition but a pervasive, domain-transcending phenomenon resulting from layered, context-specific, and model-dependent constructions of time. Its manifestations—whether anti-chronological perception, psychological mismatch, quantum paradoxes, framing effects in decision-making, or catastrophic interference in artificial learning—underscore the necessity for analytical clarity about which layer of temporality is operational, and caution against uncritical transplantation of one notion into the domain of another. The dissolution or resolution of temporal dissonance often requires refinement of underlying assumptions (e.g., emergence, irreversibility, contextualization), recognizing that no single notion of time exhausts all theoretical, perceptual, or practical demands.