TITLE:
The Temporal Manifold of Suffering—Perceptual-Temporal Scaling, Moral Status, and the Problem of Evil
AUTHORS:
Ciprian Florin Pater
KEYWORDS:
Critical Flicker-Fusion Frequency, Metabolic Scaling, Subjective Time, Moral Status, Problem of Evil, Cross-Species Welfare Comparison, Experienced-Time Integration, Philosophy of Mind
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.16 No.4,
November
4,
2026
ABSTRACT: This paper develops a quantitative bridge between the comparative neuroscience of time perception and the philosophical problem of evil. Its rigorous core rests on an established empirical regularity: a species’ maximum rate of visual temporal information processing, measured by critical flicker-fusion frequency (CFF), scales positively with mass-specific metabolic rate and negatively with body mass across vertebrates (Healy et al., 2013). I treat this scaling as defining a temporal manifold on which every nervous system occupies a characteristic refresh rate, and I formalise the conjecture—already advanced in the moral-patienthood literature—that the rate at which subjective time passes is proportional to this processing rate. From this I derive a lifetime-experience relation, conditional on jointly specified scaling exponents and the functional form linking CFF to subjective time, and argue that if morally relevant suffering is integrated over experienced rather than clock time, then the distribution of evil in the world is plausibly misweighted by anthropocentric intuition: small, fast, short-lived animals may undergo far more experienced suffering per clock-second than their lifespans suggest. I then situate this result against the major theodicies and against the Cartesian denial of animal mind that I criticised in earlier work. The contribution is a single mathematical object, the experienced-suffering functional, that makes the moral stakes of temporal perception precise and testable.