A Personal Note on Contrast-Based Structural Dynamics
My is the result of a long, private inquiry into the nature of structure, emergence, and appearance. It does not arise from institutional lineage or academic inheritance, but from the sustained attempt to reconcile what I observe, what I intuit, and what I believe to be true.
For years, I searched for a framework that could express how I experience the world—not through imposed coordinates or inherited models, but through relations, differences, and modulations in structure. Contrast-Based Structural Dynamics (CBSD) is the language that emerged from that search. It is a language not of absolute time or space, but of discernibility: of what changes, what resists change, and what becomes observable when the structure of perception itself is taken seriously.
Here, time is not something passed through—it is something resolved. Space is not a stage, but a map of distinguishability. Motion is not imposed but inferred from the internal structure of contrast. And mass is not a given quantity, but a tensorial measure of how resistant structure is to modulation. In this way, CBSD is not just a reformulation of physical law—it is a re-centering of physical meaning.
I offer this work not as a final answer, but as the clearest articulation to date of a perspective I have long held and long sought to express. For the first time, I feel that I am not merely modeling what others have taught me, but speaking from within a language that reflects how I truly see.
— André Hampshire
2025
Thought Experiments on Time and Perception
Thought Experiment: Time and Its Disappearance
Scenario: Imagine an invisible agent placed within a world that, at a certain moment, completely freezes. All matter and motion within the universe halts—except for the agent, who remains unaffected.
From the perspective of the agent, the world ceases to evolve. The sun no longer rises, waves no longer crash, bodies no longer fall. The agent continues to move, but against what? The environment presents no variation, no succession of events, no perceptual modulation. In this state, despite their own internal changes, the agent begins to experience a profound absence of time.
Insight: Time is not an external parameter—it is the contrast between evolving structural states. The agent only perceived time when the environment offered something relative to change against. When contrast vanishes, so too does time.
Interpretation: Within the framework of Contrast-Based Structural Dynamics (CBSD), this thought experiment illustrates the central role of discernible variation. Time emerges as the integral of contrast modulation across a resolution threshold. Without relative structural change, there is no temporal structure to resolve. Time, therefore, is not absolute—it is a measure of perceptual divergence in state.
This scenario reveals that the apparent absence of time is often its most precise form: not as an external clock, but as the structural silence that arises when contrast disappears.
Thought Experiment: Divergent Time from Perceptual Thresholds
Scenario: Two observers watch a bullet traveling slowly through water. The bullet's displacement between two frames is subtle, resulting in a low-contrast change in the visual field.
- Observer A: Low contrast resolution threshold → sees motion → time advances.
- Observer B: Higher threshold → sees no motion → time does not advance.
Insight: Time is not universally defined—it is resolved only when structural contrast modulation exceeds an observer's resolution threshold. Temporal experience diverges across observers, not due to velocity (as in relativity), but due to differential sensitivity to structural change.
Formalization: A temporal event occurs for observer \( O \) over interval \( [t_1, t_2] \) only if:
\[ \int_{t_1}^{t_2} \left| \frac{dC}{dt} \right| \, dt > \rho_O \]
This experiment illustrates the observer-dependent emergence of time: a bullet may “move” through time for one observer and remain temporally static for another, depending solely on the perceptual modulation structure.