This is a very long message indeed, and I apologise in advance. But perhaps worth it.

The 'scientific' data concerning the specious present allows some interesting speculation; to follow and develop on our last exchange, we can look at this - in part, at least - as some kind of 'informed metascientific reflection'…

*Acts of presentation*

IF acts of presentation are taken as the basis for establishing the specious present, we can – following Gibson and Pooley's (2006) comments on the 'Stein present' - calculate its 'extent' in spacetime. According to the data you give, acts of presentation last from 200ms to 3000ms, with an average duration of approximately 700ms. By a simple-enough calculation, this allows us to describe the specious present as a four-dimensional discus shaped region with a spatial radius of from 60 000km – 900 000km and a temporal extent of 0.2s to 3s, with an average radius of 210 000 km for a temporal extent of 0.7s. This is of course the maximum spatial extent for the intervals under consideration; the 'real' extent would depend on local conditions; nonetheless, it would still allow for a vast number of events that might occur 'within' the subject's specious present – and with which he can 'interact' (and we can compare this with the extremely limited number of events with which the subject can interact if we retain the classical, Augustinian "instantaneous present").

We should also bear in mind that the specious present thus defined is a very different hypothesis from a specious present based on a 'timelet' in the sense given in the Bell paper. While relativistic effects would be negligible over the distances implied by a timelet, they would certainly be observable at the kinds of distance I give above - for observers in different inertial frames, events which for the subject take place *within* his specious present could therefore seem to take place just before or just after it. Furthermore, while each individual occupies their particular specious present, the specious present of any one doesn't coincide exactly with that of any other. Both these points militate against the 'absolute now' required by classical presentism, and would seem to lend support for the eternalist view.

The 'perceived order of events' within the subject's specious present would also seem to militate against the Augustinian view of the present, and more particularly against the classical accounts of the order of events in time (and this, I would surmise, is the point that leads you to a partial rejection of the classic A-series/B-series opposition). Of course - and as you'd certainly be the first to agree - once we enter the realm of 'phenomenal experience' and 'psychological representation', we can no longer take 'physics' as our guide; the perception of events is dependent on numerous emergent physiological factors, to say nothing of the phenomenological component. All the same, when we consider the 'inner organisation' of events you cite, we can make some interesting speculations. To recap, this inner organisation corresponds largely to "(a) the distinction between focus and periphery, (b) the presence of internal laws of organization, and (c) the elaboration of their content in subsequent stages".

(a) would imply that the 'specious present' is not an undifferentiated region of spacetime. Let's – for the sake of argument – imagine that the 'focus' of attention concerns a region corresponding to the shorter end of the interval range (we can call this "F"), while its 'periphery' coincides with a region corresponding to the longer end of the range (we can call this "P").

Now, there is evidently a region of P that corresponds to F's immediate future. Following (b) we can allow that the perceived 'internal temporal sequence' of events within P might not correspond to the physical order of events; if we also allow that *all* events occurring within P are *at least* accessible from F, this would suggest the very interesting conclusion that our 'subjective present' covers events which are slightly in the future of the 'focus of our immediate attention'.

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A LONG BUT FRUITFUL DIVERSION

We can push speculation even further if we tie in the timelet as some kind of 'minimal spatiotemporally-oriented unit' (and I would stress that this is indeed taking speculation to perhaps unacceptable limits):

Let's imagine a timelet as being an infinitesimally short but irreducible 'interval' of around the Planck time - around 5.4×10−44 s. [Already, we should be conscious of a certain bias inherent in the choice, as the Planck time is a theoretical limit set by the mainstream view in contemporary physics; some theories and certain evidence would argue against the "Planck limit" as a *real* limit in the physical world. This is not really pertinent to Bell's arguments, as – unless my weak maths is letting me down - they hold at orders of magnitude significantly lower than the Planck limit; and furthermore, the Planck limit represents no more than a convenient peg on which we can hang a more metaphysical hypothesis.]

Setting aside this proviso, such timelets would be necessarily theoretical - that is, they are elements of a 'representation', and not of a 'reality'. This is because timelets are hypothetical one-dimensional entities corresponding to regions that are limited in four dimensions (like 'instants', they are hyperplanes of simultaneity); however, and given our theoretical understanding, it is extremely unlikely that we could make any meaningful distinctions between spatial and temporal dimensions for any 'sub-regions' *at or below* the Planck limit.

What *is* of theoretical importance – and perhaps of metaphysical interest – is that the Planck size represents an apparent limit to the four-dimensional model of spacetime. [Once again, we should add a proviso: this is of real import only if we consider certain mainstream models of 'quantum gravity' – in classical relativity, it is quite evidently NOT a limit to the mathematical modelling of 4-D spacetime; furthermore, on the theories evoked above – string theory is representative – quantum effects are not limited to the Planck scale].

Let us, nonetheless, draw the *philosophical* lesson that the Planck size represents a certain limit to a certain way of *representing* space and time. Here the notion of representation *is* important, as we have reached the limits of how we can correlate our empirical description of 'space and time' with our empirical description of 'matter' (the 'contents' of space and time). Both relativity and QM are theories built primarily on empirical evidence; historically, they represent the bouleversement of our naive belief that local conditions held universally both for the very large and for the very small (in this, they represent part of the massive epistemological revision (see NOTE below) which our worldview has been undergoing since Galileo (and perhaps Ockham and Friar Bacon ?).

In a very real sense, the 'grains' or the 'quantum foam' which our more classical theories predict represent the limit of a 'certain way of seeing the world'; and this 'certain way' is the view which promotes empiricism – the theory that knowledge of the world comes ultimately from direct experience, which is itself a question of the correlation of sensory impressions with 'webs of belief' concerning the relation of such impressions to certain kinds of phenomena. In less technical terms, it represents a limit to our *intuitions* about the world.

What are these *intuitions* about the world? That it has three dimensions of space, that it has a temporal dimension which might well be a fourth dimension of spacetime, that it contains 'things' which have 'properties' and undergo 'change', and that these 'things' can enter into relation with each other through 'occurrences' which bring about 'change'… these are the fundamental intuitions on which we have constructed our 'representation' of the *physical world*. The more scientifically-minded (Carl Hoefer, in his Stanford entry on "Causal determinism", comes to mind) will point out that our entire philosophy is polluted with such notions; nonetheless, it is such notions that metaphysical philosophy has traditionally sought to elucidate.

More importantly, the breakdown of observational empiricism would also seem to signal the failure of the neo-Quinean programme I've been defending, which draws much of its metaphysics from the descriptions of the world given by empirical science. Nonetheless, anyone who would draw this conclusion makes the mistake of forgetting that philosophy is a *linguistic* discipline. The neo-Quinean thesis is that BOTH our sense impressions and our language allow us "access to the world"; for if our sense impressions were not linked through 'observation sentences' to our general beliefs about the world and its contents, they would be meaningless sensations. Likewise, if our language did not have "to face the tribunal of experience", we would have no sure refuge but solipsism. These are purely philosophical concerns – given 'sense impressions' on the one hand, and 'language as the expression of a web of belief" on the other, we can derive 'phenomena' whenever certain *kinds* of sense impression are followed by certain, other, *kinds* of sense impression: indeed, Charles Peirce built an entire metaphysic of the sign on similar notions. The breakdown of the model of the world derived from the correlation of our sense impressions (however enhanced) and our language (however philosophically refined) is not so much a breakdown of our powers of description (our mathematics, and the physical theories derived from it, are still coherent), but rather a breakdown of our ability to draw analogies with our unenhanced, unrefined experience as human beings. We can grasp the idea of atoms being a 'little bit like little solar systems', of the solar system being 'a little bit like whirling a lot of stones around your head'; we can go further, and grasp – with less intuitive certainty, but still without too great an affront to our powers of analogy, the idea that particle are 'smeared-out' over areas of space and time that are more like probabilities than locations, and that massive bodies follow geodesics in curved spacetime. But surely, unless the universe was constructed either for or by the human mind, there is a limit at which new 'knowledge' can only be integrated by analogy with notions that are themselves at the limit of what our 'intuition' can grasp (this notion parallels, of course, the limit implied by the Planck scale in classical physical theory).

Quine suggested that we adopt or integrate the scientific account not from naïve scientific realism, but in order to clear up certain purely philosophical problems (the traditional problems of "First Philosophy") – more recently, Ted Sider ("Four-dimensionalism", 2001) gives similar justification for accepting the 'counter-intuitive' hypothesis that entities persist through an ontology-undifferentiated four-dimensional spacetime. Our concern as philosophers is not to arbitrate on which particular order of magnitude represents the 'actual frontier of reality', but rather to account for our intuitions concerning objects, properties, change, time, space, events and the like.

Two of the constants from which the Planck limit is derived – c and G - concern notions ('light' and 'gravity') that, albeit entirely refined of their everyday sense, are derived from fundamental and initially-unenhanced empirical observation; h-bar is more distantly derived from reflections on energy and work. But, however refined they might be, they are distantly descended from elements we first detect in our reflections on our phenomenal experience. At certain orders of magnitude, and whichever account (QFT, M-theory, "Many Worlds"…) best approximates 'the nature of reality', we can no longer find anything that corresponds to our 'intuitive view of reality'.

This rather long diversion allows us to establish a philosophical position: whatever the "actual nature of reality" at and below the Planck limit, and whatever the "actual effects" of quantum occurrences at and above the Planck level, we can provide a reasonable philosophical argument for considering *a certain level* of 'reality' as representing a limit for any metaphysical analysis of our 'everyday talk' about objects, time and the like – as these notions have no apparent correlates beyond such a level. This notion is addressed "philosophically" by Bell's arguments: if we can describe mathematically the minimum interval in which spacetime has 'orientation' while not yet exhibiting curvature, then we have described the conceptually-minimal notion we can have about spacetime (a classical singularity is, of course, a point at which our notions 'break down').

***

Once we allow that, ultimately, it might not be able to give us nice, clear-cut boxes into which we can sort objects, times, locations and the like, ontology is a flexible discipline. While we can't be sure what's going on 'down there', we can see what's going on 'up here' – and, with enhancement, to the upper limits of the 'visible' universe. Our ontology of planets, stars, and satellites is as certain as our ontology of rocks, oceans, and volcanoes; our ontology of galaxies is as well founded on our ontology of stars as our ontology of gases is founded on our ontology of molecules. Human beings, nuclear explosions, and (perhaps) the colour blue inhabit the 'same' world of space and time; and by extension, so do biological cells, sub-atomic reactions and (possibly) sense impressions. [The qualification in both sets of examples denotes the demarcation between the scientific and the philosophical investigation of 'our' world].

Language carves reality, whether that 'reality' is a hypostasis of language itself or some independent regularity underlying our phenomenal experience. We can use our language of 'everyday things', with a few additions from general scientific culture, to carve the world to our guise, basing – either implicitly or explicitly – our statements on conditions obtaining in this or that region of spacetime. "There's a dog in the garden" implicitly defines a certain region of space (I take it my interlocutor knows to which particular garden I'm referring) and a certain interval of time (around the time of speaking); it also reports on conditions obtaining in a certain sub-region of that space within that interval; we can perhaps avoid going as far as Quine in saying that the content of that region 'dogs', but still retain the general idea: "a dog occupies a certain sub-region of that region of spacetime which is this particular garden" [the objection that there might be more than one dog is a straw man]. It follows from my beliefs about dogs that I would affirm (if asked) that within this same region there is a mass of various biological tissue etc. etc.; it follows from my views as a philosopher that I would postulate that the region contained a stage or part of a perduring four-dimensional entity. We can, as I remarked, carve spacetime to our guise; the limitation is generally that what we carve make some kind of intuitive sense (an entity which consists of my nose, the Eiffel Tower in 1903, and the assassination of Julius Caesar is entirely possible but serves no intuitively-acceptable end, save in philosophical discourse). It would seem that, down to a certain limit, and however much we might adapt or modify it, this criterion of "intuitive sense" serves in the justification of our philosophical positions.

TO RETURN TO "TIMELETS"

If we follow this line of reasoning, we can perhaps consider "timelets" to be representations or models of the fundamental elements of our intuitive understanding of time. I remarked above that "timelets" are hypothetical one-dimensional entities corresponding to regions that are limited in four dimensions; this being the case, we should rather use a term which implies both their spatial and their temporal extent – and here we arrive by an independent route to Roberto's "chronotopoids". Nonetheless, chronotopoids are more general, and are not necessarily limited to timelets/spacelets and their fusions. The timelet/spacelet chronotopoid corresponds to the particular way in which the interpretation of physical theory carves the limits of our intuitive understanding of the space and time we inhabit. Other chronotopoids, at levels of 'reality' well above the hypothetical limit, will carve a physical spacetime which corresponds more to the Euclidian, Newtonian, or Minkowski interpretations.

Nonetheless, we can I think argue that "minimal chronotopoids" – minimal spatiotemporal regions - are as 'real' as are rocks, atoms, or grains of sugar.

TO CONCLUDE – THE SPECIOUS PRESENT AGAIN

We can, perhaps, consider the specious present as being 'ontologically' dependent on minimal chronotopoids (that is, made up of some kind of spacetime foam). Orientation in the immediate vicinity of any chronotopoid would be almost undetectable, as the distances and intervals involved would render untenable any classical description of 'causal structure' based on the temporal interval between events. Nonetheless, the overall extent of the specious present allows that a general orientation be detected; this orientation would seem to be given by the direction in which the 'structure' of the immediate contents of the spacetime region tends towards homogeneity. [Further, and entirely unfounded, speculation: could the phenomenal sense of time the passage of time be some kind of 'wave-like' phenomenon arising from increasing local complexity and decreasing complexity on a more general level].

It would seem to follow from the various points we've discussed that within the focal area of the specious present there is no clear order of events, from which it follows that there is neither an internal distinction between past, present, and future, nor a clear 'flow' of time, though there is a general sense of "orientation" - indeed, the specious present so described would seem to resemble (though perhaps not in every particular) the block-universe of eternalism.

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NOTE ON "EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVISION": this is a different, but equally fascinating, area of reflection. I hope to return to it when we consider 'social' models of time.