The felt passage of time is the cooling of the activation field, not a tick
count and not an elapsed-seconds readout. engram_age_field(delta_ms) cools the
field (working_memory_weight + background_activation) by the caller's MEASURED
wall-clock delta with a pure exponential exp(-dt/TC) — no per-call floor — so it
is exactly scale-invariant: N ticks summing to the same elapsed time produce the
same total cooling. It returns the cooling MAGNITUDE (1-exp(-dt/TC), a bounded
[0,1) drift signal), never elapsed seconds.
Reboot = anesthesia: a global last-tick wall-clock stamp is persisted to a
sidecar (chrono_last_tick) in the data dir. engram_age_field_catchup() reads it
on boot, applies ONE cooling for the whole unconscious gap, refreshes the stamp,
and reports the magnitude — timestamps are bookkeeping to COMPUTE the drift,
never the felt signal. TC env-tunable via ENGRAM_CHRONO_TC (default 3600s).
All inert unless ENGRAM_CHRONOCEPTION is set → OFF path byte-identical.
MEASURED on a copy (throwaway HOME, TC=3600s):
- Cooling scales with dt, matching 1-exp(-dt/TC) to 1e-6: dt=600s->0.1535,
1800s->0.3935, 3600s->0.6321, 7200s->0.8647.
- Scale-invariance EXACT: age(dt) once vs age(dt/N) N times gives identical
field sum (|delta|=0.0) for N=2, 10, 100.
- Reboot catch-up over a 1h gap cooled the field 0.60->0.4415 in one shot,
magnitude 0.6321, bounded in [0,1).
- Flag OFF: age & catchup return 0, field untouched (sum 1.2).
ASan+UBSan clean.
will.anderson
0af39df16f