The Compiler Prunes Timestamps: Quantized Temporal Decay at Sleep Boundaries and the Metadata/Structure Distinction in Episodic Memory

A B S T R A C T

THE IDENTITY FULL STACK (Elliott 2026) establishes a three-scale ar-

chitecture of the self: the First-In Cache Identity (FCI, micro), the

sleep compiler (Csleep= Bν , meso), and the Sheaf-of-Contexts Iden-

tity (SCI, macro). The compiler’s function is to integrate the day’s uncom-

mitted diffs ∆(n) into the global section¯

sn, producing a new deployment

¯

sn+1 = Csleep(∆(n),¯

sn). This paper identifies what the compiler discards

during integration and derives the consequences for temporal experience.

We prove that temporal coordinates are metadata—information about

episodes, not information in episodes—and that the compiler correctly prunes

them because they are not load-bearing for the global section’s cohomolog-

ical integrity. The structural content of an experience (what connected to

what, what changed what) is preserved because it enters the obstruction in-

dex Ob. The temporal coordinate (when exactly it happened) is pruned be-

cause it does not.

The consequence is quantized temporal decay: temporal resolution does

not degrade smoothly but drops in discrete steps at each sleep boundary, be-

cause each compilation event prunes one pass of temporal metadata from the

compiled material. Within the current waking period, uncommitted diffs in

the FCI cache retain full timestamps and temporal resolution is exact. After

one compilation, the timestamps are gone and the structure remains. The

decay is a step function, not a gradient. The steps are quantized by the com-

pilation schedule.

We connect the result to the Crystallographic Consciousness Hierarchy

(Elliott 2026): the compiler performs a projection that collapses the time axis

while preserving all other axes of the cognitive lattice. The compiled memory

is a quasicrystal with one fewer embedding dimension—still ordered, still

rich, but with temporal resolution lost because the temporal axis was pruned.

Keywords: temporal resolution, sleep compiler, metadata pruning, quantized

decay, Identity Full Stack, FCI, SCI, step function, episodic memory, seman-

tic memory, compilation, quasicrystalline memory