Here is a rather long interview I found (and only skimmed to confirm its mostly relevant): https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-end-of-time
> All of the universal constants come down to comparing a present state to a previous-present state
The problem with this as you state it is that it is not relativistically invariant; there is no absolute "present" for the universe as a whole.
However, a more restricted version of this, where the notion of "present" is not applied to the whole universe but only to a single observer's worldline, works fine.
And if God played chess, what would be his next move? We entertain the absolute/omniscient perspective to discover answers in our simplest of games, where truth appears relative because our access to information is finite.
I'm always a fan of applying that strategy to the bigger games. Physicists might benefit if they did the same, but I understand we are at the point where philosophical assumptions form the basis for many axioms.
Along any particular person's worldline, God's "next move" is whatever the next thing is that that person experiences.
For the universe as a whole, there is no well-defined "next move", for the same reason there is no well-defined "present".
Put another way:
My writing this comment is changing the state of our universe. I'm writing it because I perceive the state change. If time is solely illusion then there would be no difference in the state between Tick #145 and Tick #146, but there is and it is this comment, which means that the universe (or at least our universe) is dependant on something that you all say doesn't exist.
I'm not saying you're all wrong, but it is a pretty surprising thing if it's true and modal realism is false.
An explosion occurred at the narrow end of the box/horn. We, the Earth, the Sun, solar system, Milky Way, everything we can see are the particles flying away from the explosion. The path we're tracing are the world lines. Indeed, these can be seen as tunnels, and we are a charged force propagating through them.
We perceive time as a cross section of the cube/horn. But things slow down where they gather. And so the actual cross section would be very lumpy. But not to our limited perception.
If that was the case there would be nothing to take it from state N to state N+1 because (as per your definition) there's nothing in-between states.
I think about time in a similar manner. The delta between point A and point B is the mutation state and point A is the initial state that was mutated into B.
Time is lodged into almost all of physics because the only way we can do something useful (not being God and not knowing the absolute equations sans-units) is to compare present values to previous-present values. That division sign wedged into every relative unit of measure - kg, sec, meter, etc - is basically a way of saying "as compared to". Present as-compared-to the-previous-present. What-is-now ÷ the-remembered-now. Universe-at-Planck-Tick #145 ÷ Universe-at-Planck-Tick #144
All of the universal constants come down to comparing a present state to a previous-present state and noticing that the delta between them is a consistent value. I don't think this is really news to many, but it helped to make physics and the some of the exotic math behind it make more sense to me.