Multiscale Information Transmission in Human Evolution: Towards a Three-Dimensional Temporal Formalism

Human evolution presents a multiscale problem of information transmission spanning intracerebral neural processing on millisecond timescales, interpersonal learning within small-scale social units over individual lifetimes, and cumulative cultural accumulation across hundreds of millennia. The "Homo informatio" schema identifies these as three coupled levels whose interaction drove the emergence of the human cognitive-cultural niche. We provide a conceptual-formal synthesis and argue that the coupled, multiscale, and perspectivally structured temporal dynamics of this system raise a relevant problem of temporal representation that existing single-axis formalisms handle with inconsistencies. Active inference and the Zone of Bounded Surprisal provide the computational vocabulary for describing information transmission at each level, but their standard one-dimensional temporal formulation does not naturally capture the geometric structure of cross-scale coupling or the perspectival distortions inherent in both the archaeological record and human temporal cognition. Drawing on a mathematical system for three-dimensional time, we propose, provisionally, that a three-dimensional temporal formalism, with orthogonal axes representing the characteristic dynamics of intracerebral, interpersonal, and evolutionary-scale information transmission, may offer one candidate architecture for representing these dimensionally related processes. A minimal dynamical system with explicit coupling terms and a projection operator onto single-axis clock-time is introduced. The information-theoretic result of Ortega and Tishby, that perceived duration corresponds to the change in an agent's predictive memory state, is reinterpreted here as a vector quantity in this three-dimensional temporal space, providing a formal link between time-perspectivism and multiscale information processing. A measure of temporal integrated information, structurally related to but distinct from integrated information theory, is proposed as a formalization of cross-scale coupling strength. The system is connected to the Baldwin effect, working memory expansion, white matter maturation, and the non-linear tempo of the archaeological record. Conditions for empirical support, limitation, and falsification are stated explicitly.