Continuity Without a Continuum: Time, Sampling, and the Filling-In of Experience

This essay proposes that the seamlessness of lived time is a perceptual filling-in artifact directly analogous to the visual blind spot, and that the underlying machinery is the cost-structure of bandwidth-limited observers sampling an unbudgeted abstract substrate. The argument distinguishes two things ordinarily collapsed under the word time: the order of events, which is a feature of the substrate, and the felt duration of experience, which is what an observer pays to register that order. Lived continuity, on this account, is not evidence that reality is continuous; it is evidence that whatever happens between samples is not reaching the observer. Drawing on the visual-system phenomenon of perceptual filling-in, the essay argues that the gaps between an observer's frames are bridged by a next-necessary-node inference closely parallel to how the brain handles the optic-disc blind spot. To support the abstract/tangible distinction the account requires, the essay proposes an infinite-division test: things that have an operational floor under attempted subdivision are tangible; things that do not are abstract. Applied carefully, with abstract layers separated from tangible substrates, the test classifies time as abstract and observers as tangible — exactly the structure the diver-and-ocean account requires. The view triangulates among existing positions — Bergson on lived duration, Barbour on time-as-configurations, Rovelli on emergent time, and the digital-physics tradition — without reducing to any of them. It dissolves several puzzles (Zeno's paradoxes, the specious present, subjective time variation) and leaves several open (the selection problem, inter-observer agreement, the relationship to physical t). The aim is not a final account but a way of seeing that connects sampling cost, perceptual filling-in, and the order/budget distinction as one structure.