There is only now. Movement is an illusion, but a fun illusion.

I find that hard to believe

In what sense is your self right now the same as your self 15 years ago? Do you believe in a soul, and that both "selves" have the same soul?

I don't think a discussion of self/soul is appropriate here at all since we don't even know what they are if they exist at all. I do know that time has been there before souls/selves so I doubt the introduction of souls/selves would have such a bearing on the nature of time that it can be used to argue its nature.

Continuity seems even more tenuous when there's no "self" to hold it together. What's the basis for claiming continuity? Is it just because the state of the universe at this second can be related to the state of the universe a second ago?

yes. don't you think that the matter in the universe a second ago is the same matter now? are you saying that with every second a new universe is refreshed? that there is no distinction between space and time?

take radioactive decay for instance, I think it would be hard to explain how it happens without continuity

The latter more than the former. I think the matter a second ago is "the same" as the matter now in the same sense that the left side of my desk is "the same" matter as the right side.

how about photons? a photon that leaves the sun with information and gets to earth 8 minutes later is surely the same photon that left 8 minutes ago?

Only in a time-independent sense. The left side of my desk is still "the same desk." What is "special" about the time axis?

When a particle exists now and one second ago, it hasn't really "moved" from the past to the future.

It's still there in the past, isn't it? If not, then the past doesn't exist.

it's not special, it's just a different axis.

Does this "theory" of non-continuity have any predictive power?

Who says it's not? We don't understand the computation of human decisions yet, but that doesn't mean much.

Also there are already computers that perform calculations we may be unable to understand. I hear computers can develop math theorems hundreds of pages long.

It's still in the past. And it was in the present all along.

There is no past without it. Nor was there ever a present without it. At time t=x it was there, and at time t=x-1 it was there.

It was "always" in both places. So in what sense did it move?

No more or less than that of continuity.

That doesn't imply that there's no such recipe in theory, or that such a recipe doesn't describe decision-making at some level of abstraction.

What does that mean, past "becomes" a void? Our verbs are built to use time in their conjugations. So how can we apply them to time itself? Are you saying that at a certain point in time, the past became a void? Was that point in time in the past?

Also, if the past is a complete void now, then it doesn't exist, does it? It's an illusion. If the past can't be said to exist in the past, or in the present, or in the future, then it what sense does it exist?

In that case, saying the particle move from now-1 to now is making a factual statement about the past. But if the past doesn't even exist, how can we make factual statements about it?

According to this view, when it was in the past, the past was the present. According to this, it has only ever been in one place - the present.

Well, nobody knows. But I believe it anyway.

Yes, I agree with this. But I don't think this proves non-continuity.

First of all, you can't say something still exists in the past but I know what you mean.

But if you imagine a photon moving through space-time its line will indeed exist in the past and in the future but it doesn't mean it's not the same photon. To say movement is an illusion is like saying the photon can't move through space-time which is obviously not true unless I am missing something huge. I don't think movement is an illusion, I think the notion that the same exact thing can't exist on two different points in space time simultaneously is erroneous though.

When Feinman came up with his QED solutions he saw two waves, one ******ed and one advanced. The advanced one represented a photon starting out in the future and moving into the past and the ******ed in the opposite direction. So photons do move both in space and time.

When we discard the "free" from free will, it's not to appease believers of free will, it is because in the context of choice "free" is a useless, redundant and misleading word. I think your definition of free will is fine, altough I'd drop the "free" and call it simply will/choice. Determinism and indeterminism actually has little to do with the function of choice itself, choices happen regardless of whether determinism is true or not.

Basically we're using the word choice in the same sense that we're using the word "chair" and "sitting". Choice can be as much an illusion as a chair is, but in the context of daily life it makes no sense to throw it away because of this.

It exists as the potential of all energy in the Universe to move back to a state it was in before/will be in. This is not equal to 0, but is infinitely small.
There's also an infinitely small probability, that I'm typing this right now and in the next "moment", I'm 1000 years in the future/past.
The bigger the mass of the object, the smaller this possibility.
So in the world of quantum states, this is more common than here.
Fields of energy from the future influencing those in the past, which in return influence some fields of energy now, which in return influence.......
There's no real "randomness" to events, but you'd have to know all possible states for all fields of energy for all possible points of view to know which one influenced which. The number of possible combinations........oh boy.
"Reality" is not a wave of events, but the result of subtracting all possible events in this almost infinite set of possibilities. You know, it's kinda complicated. Hmmm, it's like a poem made out of the words that remain when you take all poems there are and delete those words that you find in another poems. The set of these words is small (our Universe) compared to the set of all poems (all possible states of the Universe(s), compared to all words in all poems (all possible states of every field of energy in every possible Universe(s)).

My head spins, but that's kinda it.

but a photon (or any "particle" really) may not really be as we like to think of them. If particles are really just some kind of manifestation from waves of energy then there really isnt the kind of temporal coherence that you're talking about. Is the vibration of a guitar string the *same* vibration a moment later?