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1. Conceptual Reversal: Duration as Lens, Not Landscape

This article proposes a fundamental inversion of metaphysical priority: instead of treating duration as something that flows within a pre-given temporal landscape—whether in classical mechanics or relativistic physics—it reimagines durée as a lens, a recursive operator that actively structures what appears from an underlying manifold.

In this framework, the four-dimensional spacetime continuum—Minkowski’s “block universe”—remains as a static ontological background, a complete terrain of relational potentialities. However, what brings this manifold into the foreground of experience is not motion through time, but perceptual traversal: a dynamic process of recursive selection, folding, and attention.

Thus, durée is not a coordinate or a stream—it is an operator:

 D: ℳ ⟶ A
 (where ℳ is the Minkowski manifold, and A is the field of appearances—the lived now)

This operator is proposed to have a fractal structure: self-similar, recursive, and capable of generating nested patterns of temporal salience. Like computational models of cognition (e.g. predictive processing), this fractal durée operates by overlapping cycles of memory, expectation, and attention—constructing the experienced flow of time not by passive observation, but through active inference and rendering.

2. Parallel with Cognitive Science: Predictive Flow and Compression

Insights from neuroscience—particularly predictive coding and free energy minimization (e.g., Friston, Clark)—illuminate this model. Perception, under these views, is not raw reception but an iterative loop of prediction and correction, continuously shaping experience.

The same logic is applied temporally: durée functions as a recursive inference engine, not processing time linearly but hierarchically. Moments of novelty or affective significance are magnified, while stretches of habitual or redundant input are compressed or skipped—leading to the phenomenological unevenness of time (a long minute, a short hour).

In this reading, durée is like a map-reader, assembling coherent experience from a static whole by recursive salience detection. It animates the block universe—not by traversing it in a simple vector, but by recursively composing relevance, intensity, and sequence from latent structure.

3. The Philosophical Challenge: Is Durée Fundamental?

This reinterpretation introduces a tension with classical phenomenology. Henri Bergson famously argued that duration is ontologically prior to spatialization or abstraction. For him, durée is indivisible, qualitative, and creative—while the spatialized block model is a secondary construct.

If durée is treated as an operator acting on a given manifold, does this reduce it to a function of consciousness, a derivative filter applied to objective reality? Or does it still hold metaphysical primacy?

To resolve this, duration must be reconceptualized not as a byproduct of perception, nor as a stream within spacetime, but as a co-constitutive principle—both operator and origin. Durée becomes a recursive ontogenetic function: structuring the very appearance of temporal reality through cycles of attention, memory, and affect.

Thus:

• The block universe is not fully given without durée—it requires traversal to manifest.

• Durée is structurally fractal, generating temporal coherence at multiple nested scales.

• This aligns with process metaphysics (e.g., Whitehead), where reality is composed not of inert events but of dynamic “occasions” of experience, each synthesizing past and anticipating future.

4. Implications and Synthesis

This reframing enables a dual fidelity: to both the precision of physics and the richness of lived experience.

• Physics offers the static manifold: a timeless structure of potential relations.

• Durée supplies the traversal logic: the recursive, context-sensitive process through which this structure becomes animated into experience.

Fractal durée thus acts as a bridge: it does not discard physics, but activates it—constructing subjective time not by flowing forward, but by folding the block inward into the recursive now.

Summary

• Duration is not a stream, but the recursive logic by which time appears.

• Fractal durée is a non-linear traversal operator that extracts temporality from a static manifold.

• It resonates with contemporary models of cognition and perception while remaining faithful to phenomenological insights.

• Ultimately, durée must be seen as structurally generative and ontologically prior: not a passive overlay, but an active unfolding of reality itself.