But there is no gap between things happening - it's a continuum!
You can't describe something (X) as continuous (versus discontinuous) until and unless you accept the notion that X is "real" in some sense.
Your seemingly direct experience is actually indirect, being mediated by your neural equipment and how it functions.
The notion that there is a "real" linear coordinate dimension that has its own objective characteristics is, in effect, a fiction or figment of our human imaginations. It's a construct or orientation that simplifies our descriptions of and explanations for dynamic changes we perceive.
Our sensory perception and cognitive recognition of what's perceived is not, as it turns out, continuous at all. Your neural infrastructure is accepting, processing, depicting, and (for lack of a better term) "recording" your sensory experience in rapid cycles (multiple times per second). Your subjective impression (itself a product of the same set of neural infrastructure) is simplified into a sort of blurred continuity. This is analogous to the manner in which a series of static images (frames) presented at a high enough speed (frames per second) will be perceived as a continuously dynamic single image. This is how movies and videos work in presenting an apparent (but merely apparent) impression of continuity and seamless change.
If I place you in a dark room in front of a projection screen, and coordinate the projector's projection of a red dot on the screen with your cyclical brain wave patterns just right, I can either:
- not project the red dot at the precise instants your visual system is "capturing" a bite of light, and hence prevent you from perceiving the dot's presence (even if the dot is being projected for the majority of the experiment's duration); or
- project the red dot only during those brief intervals when your visual system is "capturing" the scene, and hence make you perceive the dot as a persistent presence (even if the dot is being projected for only a small fraction of the experiment's duration).
In this latter case, your neural infrastructure is simplifying an extremely fast series of flashing dots into a subjective impression of a continuously present / persistent dot.
In an analogous but higher-order fashion, your cognitive capabilities are simplifying recognized discontinuous changes within your perceived / received impressions of the environment into a continuous linear progression of changes. We treat this apparent progression as if it's a characteristic of an objective environment passively perceived, when it's actually a descriptive fiction projected onto an environment the perception of which we actively construct and construe to a large extent.
We are biased toward attributing this impression to the environment because it's an inescapable result of experience in light of how we (especially our perceptual / cognitive faculties) operate. We don't readily recognize it as a side-effect of how we operate because we are more or less blind to how we operate when immersed in operating.
Once we're biased into projecting this linear motif onto the dynamics of the perceived environment, we can turn around and treat it as the basis for a sort of virtual yardstick which can be applied to illustrate and / or measure distances among discriminable points along the progression's course. In measuring spatial distances, there's a direct mapping applied between linear spatial disjunctions and a set of marks representing units of measurement on one's ruler. Informally, these marks are sometimes called "ticks" (not to be confused with "tick marks" used to check items on a list).
In measuring ephemeral temporal distances, an analogous mapping is done with respect to units of duration. These units must be, and hence are, demarcated by a different type of "tick" - i.e., an instance of an action or event that is cyclical and repeats with a reliably uniform frequency. The audible ticks of a clock are also, and in the other sense, the ticks along the virtual yardstick we use for measuring linear "time."
Circling back to the quirks of our neural infrastructure and discontinuous "captures" translated into an impression of a continuous linear progression ... The cyclical "ticking" of a clock's physical or virtual functioning is used to measure distances / disjunctions along a progression whose very conceptualization is not commonly understood to be derived from the "ticking" of another cyclically operating mechanism - i.e., the human perceptual / cognitive apparatus. As such, the very notion of "time" is based on the nature of the observer and his / her subjective operations "inside" rather than the sort of objectively demonstrable factors pertaining to spatial phenomena "out there."
As a result, it's far more defensible to consider "time" as a conveniently simplified explanatory fiction for addressing an inescapable state of affairs associated with how we each work individually rather than a demonstrably objective characteristic of the universe we inhabit.
Anyway ... This is how I formally see it. I make no claims about the extent (if any) to which INT21 was alluding to or pointing toward this sort of interpretation of "time".