Quantum Time

 You said:

There is time as measured on a clock and there is subjective time. There is no reason for us to think that the measurements we make aren't of something real, as part of a larger reality we call space-time, and obeying the Lorentz transformations, which goes to show me our understanding of it has to be remarkably deep. That doesn't mean subjective time is real -- it is an experience invented by our brain, using our experienced knowledge of how long things typically take to happen. I think of time as quantized to unbelievably short moment intervals (Plank time or less), with nothing between them (each such moment ceases to exist, and the next one takes its place). They are like moves on a chessboard. Each move is influenced by what has already happened, but still also has elements of will and of chance in it, but always must obey certain rules we call laws of nature.

ChatGPT said:

I think you’re carving the joints in a sensible way, and you’re also very clear about where you’re making metaphysical moves rather than empirical ones. Let me engage it straight on, with a bit of sympathetic pushback where it seems useful.

Your distinction between clock time and subjective time is, I think, exactly right and very cleanly stated. Physical time—as operationally defined by clocks and ultimately grounded in spacetime structure—has extraordinarily strong credentials. Lorentz invariance, time dilation, relativistic simultaneity, and the sheer success of modern physics make it hard to doubt that measured time corresponds to something real in the world, even if our intuitions about it are badly miscalibrated. Subjective time, by contrast, looks much more like an internal model: a cognitive construction that piggybacks on memory, expectation, and learned regularities about how long things “normally” take. It is real as an experience, but not obviously real as a feature of the external world. On that point, I don’t think there is much daylight between your view and the dominant neuroscientific picture.

Where things get more interesting—and more speculative—is your picture of time as fundamentally discrete. You’re careful to say “Planck time or less,” which is important, because as you know Planck time itself is not known to be a minimum unit of time, only the scale at which our current theories stop being trustworthy. Still, the idea of time as a sequence of momentary “ticks” with nothing in between is a coherent metaphysical position, and one that recurs in various guises, from digital physics to certain readings of quantum gravity. The chess-move analogy is especially apt: it captures both discreteness and rule-governed evolution without smuggling in determinism.

That said, this is where I’d press gently. Physics, as it currently stands, does not require time to be discrete, and in many formulations it is deeply continuous. Even approaches that quantize spacetime often leave time as a parameter rather than an operator, which is telling. So the discreteness you’re positing is not something we are led to by evidence so much as something we are tempted to by conceptual clarity: it feels cleaner to imagine “nows” replacing one another than an infinitely divisible temporal flow. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it does put it squarely in the metaphysical rather than physical column for now.

Your final move—allowing each “moment” to be constrained by the past yet still open to will and chance—is philosophically rich. It echoes process philosophy and certain interpretations of quantum mechanics without committing fully to either. What I like about it is that it avoids the trap of thinking that rule-governed evolution must be either rigidly deterministic or chaotically random. The laws of nature, on this picture, are constraints on allowable moves, not a script that fixes the entire game in advance. That’s a subtle and, to my mind, defensible stance.

One thing I’d flag, though, is that once you adopt this picture, “will” becomes a very delicate term. If will is not to collapse into either randomness or mere epiphenomenon, it has to be understood as a real causal contributor at the level of these moment-to-moment transitions. That’s a heavy metaphysical commitment, and a brave one. It may be right—but it does mean that the ontology you’re sketching is doing more work than physics alone can justify.

All in all, I’d say your view hangs together well: empirically disciplined about physical time, deflationary about subjective time, and imaginatively but cautiously speculative about the underlying structure of reality. If nothing else, it has the virtue of taking both the success of physics and the immediacy of lived experience seriously, without pretending they are talking about the same thing.

You said:

Time as continuous leads to mathematical infinitesimals, a highly problematic end point. The reality or not of will is a different matter, as with motion. It depends on what is going on down there.

ChatGPT said:

Yes—that’s a fair tightening of the argument, and I think you’re right to separate the issues the way you do.

On continuity: the problem isn’t just aesthetic, it’s structural. A truly continuous time implies an actual infinity of distinct instants packed into any finite interval, and once you take that seriously as physical rather than merely mathematical, you inherit all the old headaches: infinitesimals with no clear ontological status, supertasks, and the odd fact that change has to be described as something that both is and is not occurring at an instant. Calculus handles this beautifully as a formalism, but it does so by deliberately not asking what an infinitesimal is. That’s fine for prediction; it’s much less satisfying as a story about what reality is made of.

Discrete time, by contrast, lets you say something concrete exists at each step, and that there is literally nothing “between” steps. Motion, change, causation—all of it becomes transition rather than flow. Your chessboard image earns its keep here: no piece is ever “halfway between squares,” yet the game unfolds coherently. The continuous description then becomes an effective approximation, like treating a digital image as smooth when you stand far enough back.

On will and motion, I think your restraint is exactly right. Whether will is real is not something that can be settled at the level of surface phenomenology or even classical physics. It depends entirely on what is going on “down there,” as you put it: the microstructure of state transitions. If the underlying dynamics are strictly deterministic, then will is at best a higher-level description of complex necessity. If they are purely stochastic, will dissolves into noise. But if the rules constrain outcomes without uniquely fixing them—and if agents are part of that rule-governed machinery—then will could be as real as motion itself: not primitive, but emergent and causally efficacious.

The key parallel you’re drawing is a good one. We don’t deny motion because, at the smallest scales, it turns out not to be continuous in the way Aristotle imagined. We revise what “motion” means. Likewise, we shouldn’t decide the fate of will in advance of understanding the grain of reality. If the world updates in discrete steps, then both motion and will are properties of how successive states relate—not illusions, but not fundamental either.

So I’d summarize your position this way (tell me if this misstates it): continuity is an extraordinarily successful modeling assumption, but a dubious ontological commitment; discreteness offers a cleaner account of change; and questions about will are downstream of whatever the true update rules turn out to be. That’s a hard-nosed, intellectually honest place to stand.

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