Disclosure: This post was written by Claude after a chat about time and duration. As a musician emeritus, I suggested the connexion between free time, metred time, and the quantising of ProTools. This discussion occurred as I was talking through a more serious piece on duration and time as ontic versus phenomenological essences. Not wanting to divert my efforts too far, I asked Claude to summarise our chat for this blog post. If you don’t like AI-authored content, this is your opportunity to exit. As for the rest, Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
Musicians have been complaining about quantisation for decades. You record a performance — human, breathing, alive — and then the software snaps every note to the nearest grid point. The timing is “correct.” The feel is gone. Something was there and now it isn’t.
The standard explanation is that quantisation removes “feel” or “groove” — which is true but vague. What it actually removes is everything that falls between the intervals. The micro-deviations. The fractional push ahead of the beat, the slight drag behind it, the breath between phrases that doesn’t land on any grid division. These aren’t imprecisions. They’re the performance. Quantisation doesn’t tidy up the music; it overwrites it with a metrically perfect substitute and calls the result an improvement.
This is not a blog post about music production.
This is a blog post about time — and about the fact that the ProTools complaint is a precise, intuitive articulation of a philosophical problem that has been mishandled for over a century.
Here’s the short version. Duration — the actual temporal fabric of things — is something like free time in music. Not metrically structured, not divided into equal intervals, not indifferent to direction. Just: what’s happening, happening. Time, as we ordinarily understand it — clock time, measured time, the physicist’s time — is what you get when you impose intervallic structure on duration. Bar lines. A tempo marking. A grid.
The grid is useful. Indispensable, even. But it’s representational. It organises what’s there; it doesn’t discover what’s there. We no more find intervals in duration than we find bar lines in birdsong.
Now here’s where physics gets into trouble.
The equations of motion are time-symmetric. Run them forwards or backwards, they work either way. Pop science takes this and says: therefore time could, in principle, go backwards. Time travel! Reversed entropy! Christopher Nolan!
But this is exactly like saying: the score reads the same in both directions, therefore the music could be played backwards and remain the same music. It couldn’t. The score is the grid. The music is not the grid. The formal symmetry of the notation tells you something about the representational scheme. It tells you nothing about the direction of the performance.
Bergson saw half of this a century ago. He insisted that lived time — durée — is irreducible to the physicist’s spatialised coordinates. He was right. But he made his own version of the musician’s error: he confused free time with no time at all. Playing without a click track isn’t escaping metric structure. It’s still playing notes in sequence. Bergson thought philosophical intuition could recover duration as it actually is — but the feel of playing freely is still the feel of playing. It’s closer to the truth than the metronome is, but it’s not the truth itself.
Einstein, meanwhile, gave us the most sophisticated metronome ever built and then we all agreed the metronome was the music.
And ProTools? ProTools is what happens when you take the grid seriously enough to enforce it absolutely. Quantise everything. Snap every event to the nearest interval. And then notice — as every musician who has ever hit that button notices — that something real has been lost. Not a feeling. Not a subjective impression. Something that was in the sound is no longer in the sound.
That loss is the point. The grid cannot fully capture what it organises. There is always a residue — and the residue isn’t a flaw in the grid or a limitation of the technology. It’s a structural feature of any intervallic imposition on something continuous. The grid does real work. But the work it does is not the same as the thing it works on.
Time doesn’t go backwards. It doesn’t go forwards either. “Going” is what the grid gives you. Duration doesn’t go anywhere. It’s what’s already there before the grid arrives.
The musicians have known this all along. They just didn’t know it was philosophy.
I’ve got a new annotated edition of Heidegger‘s Being and Time, and it’s got me thinking about time – and thinking out loud. Obviously, Husserl is invoked by Heidegger, and the notion of duration (via durée) is from Bergson. Memory is not stored in the brain by| Victoria Trumbull on IAI TV might have been the real tipping point. I’m not sure how far I’ll develop this, but I wanted to capture my thoughts so I can refocus on my other topics, Parfit and Frege–Geach, to name two.
Audio: NotebookLM summary podcast of this topic.
NB: I feel compelled to walk the NotebookLM podcasters back onto the reservation with their ending flurry. I would never posit that humans (or beings) will ever have direct access to The Universe™. All access, per MEOW, is necessarily limited by mediational encounter.
Duration – in a sense that will require distinguishing from Bergson’s – is ontologically prior. It is not the absence of structure but structure prior to segmentation, ordering, and metric discretisation. Time – segmented into intervals, directionally ordered, and metrically structured – is what results when intervalic form is imposed upon duration. The imposition is representational rather than discovered: we do not encounter intervals in duration any more than we encounter grid-lines in a landscape. It is not imposed from outside experience but enacted from within it, through the structuring operations by which finite subjects render duration intelligible as time, and this includes succession itself. The ‘before-and-after’ of temporal experience is not inherited from duration but is itself a product of the intervalic cut – the minimal structure required for the grid to function as a grid. Without this stronger claim, the imposition would merely metricise an already ordered flow. Duration would then retain an intrinsic direction independent of the grid. The present thesis denies this: prior to the imposition, duration has no intrinsic ordering of the sort the grid later makes available. This does not make time unreal; it makes it derivative. What follows is an articulation of the temporal distinctions that become available once the imposition is in place.
Once the intervalic cut is made, experience within its frame exhibits an asymmetric structure. The present, the past, the future, history, and futurity are not features of duration itself but modes of access that become intelligible only within the imposed temporal grid. They may be stated compactly:
Present – actuality at the dimensionless limit of the intervalic cut.
Past – prior actuality, no longer extant, now only reconstructible from retention, trace, and surviving fragment.
Future – possible actuality, not yet extant, available only through projection, expectation, and extrapolation from present constraints.
History – lossy interpolation from fragmentary surviving traces of prior actuality.
Futurity – lossy extrapolation from present constraints, tendencies, and uncertainties.
Because the grid resolves duration only partially and from a situated cut, both reconstruction and projection are necessarily lossy: the former inherits only traces of what has been structured, the latter extends only tendencies available from where the cut presently stands.
NotebookLM Infographic on this topic.
What ordinary experience calls the present is not, however, the dimensionless limit itself. It is a heuristic tolerance-band, a phenomenal spread across the cut that permits experience to function as though it inhabits a moment with extension. The strict present, as a product of the intervalic imposition, is an abstraction: a point that formal structure requires but that experience cannot occupy without borrowing width from duration. It is here, at the tolerance-band, that the imposition fails to fully displace what it organises. The failure is not accidental. Any representational scheme that discretises a continuous prior will underdetermine what it carves – there will always be a residue that the grid cannot fully resolve. The tolerance-band is where that residue is phenomenally evident.
The asymmetry between past and future is real, but it is real within the grammar of access generated by the intervalic imposition rather than as a primitive feature of duration itself. The past is reconstructed from what has obtained; the future is projected from what may obtain. A natural objection arises: if duration is truly without intrinsic direction, why is this asymmetry so stubbornly one-way? Why can we not reconstruct forwards or project backwards in any equivalent sense? The answer is that the imposition is not directionless even though what it is imposed upon is. The intervalic cut does not merely segment – it orders, and the ordering it introduces is irreversible because the cut is made from within experience, by subjects who retain traces of what the grid has already structured but have no corresponding access to what it has not yet reached. The arrow belongs to the act of imposition, not to duration itself.
A corollary follows for physics. Bidirectional temporal coordinates are artefacts of the intervalic grid, not discoveries about the deep structure of what the grid represents. That the equations of motion are time-symmetric means only that the formalism remains invariant under temporal reversal operations. It does not mean that duration is reversible, still less that time could ‘go backwards.’ The reversibility belongs to the representational instrument, the coordinate structure and its algebraic properties, not to what is being represented. To conclude otherwise is to read the map’s indifference to orientation as evidence that the terrain has none. Philosophical positions that take this inference at face value, the block-universe interpretation being the most familiar, inherit the error rather than originate it. The error itself is simpler and more general: the conflation of formal symmetry with ontological symmetry.
Situating the Argument
The foregoing account operates on terrain that others have worked before, and it owes debts that should be made explicit – not least so that the points of departure are equally clear.
The most obvious creditor is Bergson. The ontological priority of duration, the critique of spatialised time, and the insistence that metric structure is imposed rather than discovered are all recognisably Bergsonian commitments. The departure is equally plain. Bergson characterises duration positively as qualitative becoming, heterogeneous flow, interpenetrating states – a rich inner life that spatialisation distorts. The present account is more austere. It claims that duration is structure prior to segmentation and ordering, but it does not claim to know what that structure is like from the inside. Bergson thinks he can describe what the imposition conceals; the present thesis maintains that description is itself a structuring operation and therefore cannot reach behind the imposition it enacts. Duration here is an ontological commitment, not an experiential report.
Husserl‘s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness provides much of the apparatus for the epistemic layer. Retention and protention, the specious present, the constitutive role of temporal synthesis in experience – these are Husserlian structures, and the tolerance-band is in obvious dialogue with his account of the living present. The departure is that Husserl treats these structures as disclosing the temporal character of consciousness itself, whereas the present account treats them as artefacts of the intervalic imposition. For Husserl, retention is how consciousness holds the just-past; here, retention is a mode of access that the grid makes available. The difference matters because it determines whether the phenomenology is foundational or derivative. On the present account, it is derivative – downstream of the imposition, not prior to it.
The Kantian resonance is structural rather than doctrinal. The claim that the imposition is enacted from within experience by finite subjects, and that temporal order is a condition of intelligibility rather than a feature of things in themselves, places this account in the neighbourhood of the transcendental aesthetic. But Kant‘s time is a form of inner sense – a pure intuition that structures all experience a priori. The present thesis does not commit to this. It says the imposition is enacted by subjects but does not say it is a priori in Kant’s sense, nor that it is a form of intuition rather than (for instance) a contingent cognitive achievement or an evolved heuristic. The source of the imposition is left deliberately underdetermined at this stage, since settling it prematurely would foreclose possibilities the argument has not yet earned the right to exclude.
Finally, the critique of physics ontologising its own coordinate structure has affinities with van Fraassen‘s constructive empiricism – the insistence that empirical adequacy does not entail structural correspondence between formalism and reality. The affinity is genuine but limited. Van Fraassen is concerned with the epistemology of scientific theories in general; the present argument is concerned with one specific inferential error – the slide from formal symmetry to ontological symmetry – and it grounds that error in a prior thesis about the representational character of intervalic time that van Fraassen does not share. The diagnostic is narrower and the ontological commitment is stronger.
What the present account shares with all four predecessors is the conviction that the ordinary temporal framework – past, present, future, measured and directional – is not simply given. Where it departs from all four is in its specific diagnosis of what the framework is: a representational imposition. It structures a priori, it cannot fully displace, and is enacted from within experience by subjects whose epistemic situation is constitutively shaped by the imposition itself.
Creativity is chapter nine of Iain McGilchrist’s The Matter with Things. It also marks the end of part one of three in this two-volume set.
The main thrust is to provide a lot of cases of schizophrenia to elaborate on how the deficits impact perception—and of course, attention and judgment.
Content
This chapter starts off by noting that mental illnesses are not a matter of the brain being broken like a machine. McGilchrist doesn’t much like the analogies to machines or computers, to begin with. Instead, they affect how their world is experienced. They attend to different things, which creates a different perception because we perceive what we attend to.
It is effectively a left-hemisphere challenge, but he is careful to say that we don’t have enough evidence to call it a right-hemisphere deficit. His rationale is that it could be one of these three leading scenarios:
The right hemisphere has deficits.
The left hemisphere is not performing its function to work with the right hemisphere, which is otherwise intact.
The frontal lobe which is supposed to moderate the hemispheres is not performing its function.
Schizophrenia and autism are distinct conditions, but there are some overlaps. He clarifies that schizophrenia and autism are too broad of categories (a situation made worse in the case of autism by the creation of the autism spectrum). There are types of schizophrenias and autisms that would otherwise be unrelated except for psychology’s kitchen junk drawer approach to categorisation, I suppose, following the lead of syndromes in the medical profession. I digress.
These conditions exemplify what it’s like to experience the world with an overreliance on the left hemisphere. A point he wants to make is that he feels society at large is shifting in this direction to the detriment of all concerned, that the world of business, science, politics, and bureaucracy more generally is migrating to a hyper-rational position at the expense of experiential reality.
He praises Louis Sass’s 1992 book Madness and Modernism as “one of the most fascinating, and compelling, books I have ever read”, primarily because it notes the relationship between schizophrenia and Modernism and a modern world that is experiencing an increase in the phenomena of schizophrenia.
they miss the forest for the woods
McGilchrist goes into detail about how right hemisphere deficits affect perception in schizophrenic patients. I won’t share that level of detail here. Effectively, they miss the forest for the woods and make contextual miscues, lacking in empathy and intuition. Missing this context, they jump to conclusions—invalid conclusions. He goes on to explain this from the perspective of brain construction and physiology whilst extending the conversation to include the autism spectrum, noting a general overlap between these diagnoses.
He invokes the work of Eugène Minkowski—reflecting on the foundational work of Henri Bergson—, which resonated with me, wherein Minkowski tries to simplify and characterise the hemisphere as the left representing intellect and the right being intuition. This feels about right. He shares a list of terms generally representing qualities in schizophrenics that detail what is atrophied in the intuition of the right hemisphere and what is hypertrophied (or exaggerated) in the left hemisphere. I’ll not share this list here, but I like it. He promises to elaborate on this in chapter 22.
Essentially what’s missing is a sense of coherence with experience leading to a detachment from reality as we normally experience it—and a loss of vitality and a sense of self. These people live as outsiders looking in rather than simply feeling a part of the whole. Man becomes a machine built of parts and separate to nature. Everything becomes literal. There is no room for connotation in a denotative world. But this world is disconnected from the presented reality, instead relying on a re-presented version. The world loses depth and becomes a two-dimensional caricature.
Perspective
My summary of this chapter left many details unsaid, probably more so than the preceding chapters, so a lot of context and nuance is missing. My biggest takeaway is really the scary connexion between schizophrenia and Modernity. It is far from comforting. Add to this the positive feedback loop otherwise known as a vicious cycle as societies more and more adopt a left hemisphere perspective, that of a schizophrenic, and it becomes scarier still. To make matters worse, this is not metaphorical. It’s analogical. I’m not sure how to reverse this tide.
connexion between schizophrenia and Modernity
This wraps up the chapter on schizophrenia, autism and the rest. As I mentioned at the start, this also marks the end of part one of the book. The next chapter is “What is Truth?” This will allow the reader to delve more deeply into various aspects of truth, from science to reason to intuition and imagination. This second part of the books takes us to the end of the first volume, traversing us through chapters ten to nineteen.
What are your thoughts on mental illnesses like schizophrenia and autism, especially around how they may shed light on neurotypical persons and the relationship between these and modern society?
Philosophics 