“Say you have an event that, for a single reference frame or subject, happens about once in a billion years. This doesn’t tell us the probability of it happening at any specific time, or in a specific year… though we can derive an overall probability that is generalized over the span — for example, 1/1 billionth for any given year.

But to actually understand time, as it relates to events and organisms and so on… we need a second variable. Population. So that, for example, if the period for an unobserved electron to spontaneously collapse is a around once in a billion years… in a localized collection of even 10 billion electrons this event will take place about once a month.

There are endless ways that this is significant, but what I want to emphasize is that there are in this description two different frameworks for time (as we are trained to think about it). In one of them, an event requires a billion years to occur. In another, it happens every month — or if we change the population size — trillions of times per picosecond.

It’s important to remain aware of this difference… because most of what is going on in and as organisms is a truly astonishing array of »kinds of time. They are more real than the simple, flat model of time we are trained to think it. And being able to understand them can give us new kinds of memory and … unuexpected abilities.

Each form of life is a unique domain of time. And these interact, and affect each other. And they are all being expressed at different rates of transformation… so that ‘the between’ of them is unimaginably rich with signals… toward intelligence.”

— an anonymous informant