The eventalization of time: From neural magnitude to temporal capital

This article argues that the subjective experience of time is not an a priori category of consciousness but is constructed post-priori from the organism's engagement with discrete events. Drawing on computational work showing that a single on-center off-surround recurrent network can process both numerosity and temporal duration through winner-take-all dynamics, I extend a previously developed philosophical framework, in which events hold ontological priority over time, into social theory. The computational model is deployed in two delimited roles: as an existence proof that duration experience can be generated without a dedicated timing mechanism, and as the governing account of one scale among three. I set out a stratified account in which perceptual, interval, and mnemonic regimes of temporal construction are governed by different mechanisms but by a common independent variable, the distribution of prediction violations across an agent's event stream, which I call habituation structure. If temporal experience emerges from event-magnitude processing shaped by habituation, then the social organization of events is not merely something that occurs in time but is constitutive of temporal experience itself. I introduce temporal capital to name the unequal distribution of event-richness, novelty, and agentic control over event sequencing across social positions. Against the resource-and-capacity reading that the term invites, I develop temporal capital as relational: agentic sequencing is not a stock an individual holds but a position in a distribution of rights to impose events on others’ streams. I situate this against the literature on discretionary time and temporal autonomy, which establishes the distributive claim on independent grounds, specify a measurement strategy for each dimension using existing instruments, identify the designs under which the causal claims could be tested, and state what the account cannot explain, notably the misrecognition through which an imposed temporal order comes to be experienced as one's own.