What this is a model of. An organism is not one system but many, each running on its own time base and none in charge of the rest: the fast loop of reflex, the slower loop of deliberation, the years-long settling of lifetime priors, the collective symbolic horizon, and — slowest of all — germline selection across generations. The chrono-loop is the coupling that holds these heterogeneous rates together and, under a live motor deadline, resolves them into one coherent line of action. Temporal arbitration is the load-bearing element: not whether to act but committing to a single act now, while every rate is still mid-drift.
What you can do. Each lane drifts on its own; the precision sliders set how much each rate weighs when the deadline closes. At every deadline the current states are precision-weighted and collapse into one committed act, dropped onto the line of action at the foot of the frame — the organism's single track through time. Tighten the motor deadline and the act is forced before the slow lanes can turn. There is no assessor weighing the options: the weighted collapse is the whole of it, and the only thing it answers to is the next act.
One rule at two rates. The claim the instrument carries is that cognition and evolution are not mechanism-and-product but the same blind, agentless process at different time bases — state-selection over milliseconds, germline selection over generations, with no change in kind between them. Tick link ms ↔ generations to bracket the two extreme lanes and read them as one operation, slowed or sped. This is why the chrono-loop is not a further theory added to the survey of consciousness: it is the identity two agentless frameworks share, made temporal.
Measured and felt. Described from outside, the arbitration is a precision-weighted collapse of competing states under a deadline. Undergone from within, that same arbitrating is the feeling: the pull of each time base, what grips hardest as the window closes, the settling into one act. The Reading control switches only the vocabulary and the colour — the process is identical, because there are not two events but one, read two ways. Feeling here is not a layer riding on the computation; it is what this settling is for the system that is it. The within-organism descent each such settling performs is the subject of the companion instrument, The Frame as a Landscape.
Caveats. The rates are illustrative and log-spaced for legibility, not measured; the germline lane is drawn far faster than any real generational scale so that its drift is visible at all. The single committed act is a simplification of what is, in the full system, a probabilistic settling where many moving thresholds intersect.