Time-Division Multiplexing: The Operational Rhythm and Temporal Organization Layer of Digital Life
Abstract
Continual agents must handle urgent interaction while retaining alternatives, replaying errors, and committing safe long-term changes. A previous digital-life framework distinguishes online (busy) and offline (idle) channels, but leaves open whether these are separate programs or phases of a common process and how their operations should be ordered. Motivated by recent observations of rapidly alternating perceptual representations in primate cortex, we develop a temporal organization layer with phase-tagged micro-epochs, an observable duty cycle, independent content and resource controls, and three nested clocks separating candidate exploration from durable commitment. We give a projected duty-cycle update, state its deterministic descent guarantee and the additional noise term required for a stochastic guarantee, and specify coupled busy/idle execution contracts. Five synthetic experiments (64 seeds each) examine descent and noise, objective misalignment, gain asymmetry, resource coupling, and dropped replay logs. In the gain/noise model the best tested gain ratio is 1.55; decoupled scheduling yields 26.6% versus 11.1% success on a constructed urgent/high-load subset. A frozen-backbone Qwen3-8B prototype further checks orchestration, but its proxy outcomes are not task-benchmark evidence. The results establish a testable scheduling design and identify its conditions of validity, not machine consciousness or general-purpose agent superiority.
Related
- Division-Specific Organization of a Shared Functional Scaffold in the Early-Life Human Brain
- Multicellular Communication Networks in Myocardial Ischemia-Reperfusion Injury: Spatial and Temporal Organization of Injury and Repair
- Temporal organization of shared brain states characterizes heterogeneity in major depressive disorder
- Cross-Modal Organization of Facial and Vocal Behavior Revealed by Coordination Metrics Derived from Temporal Alignment
- Spatio‐Temporal Dynamics of Macroglial Cell Organization and Proximity to Blood Vessels During Postnatal Development
BibTeX
@misc{tong2026timedivision,
title = {{Time-Division Multiplexing: The Operational Rhythm and Temporal Organization Layer of Digital Life}},
author = {Haibin Tong and Luming Guo and Nana Cui and Jiang Yu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.06603},
eprint = {2611.06603},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06603},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Time-Division Multiplexing: The Operational Rhythm and Temporal Organization Layer of Digital Life
AU - Haibin Tong
AU - Luming Guo
AU - Nana Cui
AU - Jiang Yu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.06603
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06603
AB - Continual agents must handle urgent interaction while retaining alternatives, replaying errors, and committing safe long-term changes. A previous digital-life framework distinguishes online (busy) and offline (idle) channels, but leaves open whether these are separate programs or phases of a common process and how their operations should be ordered. Motivated by recent observations of rapidly alternating perceptual representations in primate cortex, we develop a temporal organization layer with phase-tagged micro-epochs, an observable duty cycle, independent content and resource controls, and three nested clocks separating candidate exploration from durable commitment. We give a projected duty-cycle update, state its deterministic descent guarantee and the additional noise term required for a stochastic guarantee, and specify coupled busy/idle execution contracts. Five synthetic experiments (64 seeds each) examine descent and noise, objective misalignment, gain asymmetry, resource coupling, and dropped replay logs. In the gain/noise model the best tested gain ratio is 1.55; decoupled scheduling yields 26.6% versus 11.1% success on a constructed urgent/high-load subset. A frozen-backbone Qwen3-8B prototype further checks orchestration, but its proxy outcomes are not task-benchmark evidence. The results establish a testable scheduling design and identify its conditions of validity, not machine consciousness or general-purpose agent superiority.
ER -