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Why computation runs at all sizes and magnitudes
A particle resolves in less than a billionth of a second; a mountain takes fifty million years. These are not different kinds of thing — they are the same thing, state, condition, consequence, run at vastly different durations. The Computos has no preferred clock. It computes at every magnitude, because nothing in it privileges one. What we call fast and slow are only readings from where we stand.
One continuous axis, from the quantum tick to the cosmic age — sixty orders of magnitude of compute-duration. Science already names the bands: quantum, chemical, neural, physiological, human, ecological, geologic, cosmic. The doctrine's claim is only that they are one spectrum, not eight separate clocks. Click a band to read what computes there.
Duration is not arbitrary. A computation takes longer when it must run through more states, coordinate across more layers of the stack, or work through a medium where states couple slowly. The same state → condition → consequence loop, three tempos. Click a row to run its loop.
Time is the succession of states; space is their configuration. So every computation has both a duration and an extent, and the two are locked together. Small things compute fast; large things compute slow — because state cannot cross space faster than its medium allows. Plotted together, the computations of the world fall on a single diagonal. Hover a point to identify it.
A reader noticed this resembles evolution — and they are right, in the precise sense that matters. Evolution is not an analogy for the Computos; it is one of its computations, running on the multi-generation band. Variation proposes, selection resolves, generations are the clock ticks. It is state → condition → consequence, exactly — only slow, because its loop spans lifetimes. Run it to watch the loop at evolutionary tempo.
Quantum or cosmic, instant or aeon, every process is mid-computation. The Computos keeps no master clock — only countless durations, each the honest length of what it resolves. To call one fast and another slow is to forget that we, too, are a band on the spectrum.