barbour and kant

Just stumbled across an interview on Edge with physicist Julian Barbour. Toward the end of page 5 he attempts to reconcile our subjective experience of time with his view of a static, timeless reality. Specifically, he defines our subjective experience of time as a sort of weaving-together of discrete, static arrangements of matter calls "Nows".

Without knowing anything more about his theories than what I've read in the interview, it occurs to me that he may be describing something like a Kantian synthesis. But I can't shake the feeling that there's something naive about the attempt reconcile Ultimate Reality (the noumena, or Thing in Itself, which Kant would agree is timeless) with our phenomenal perception of it (as filtered through the perceptual apparatus of time and space). Because time is a condition of all possible (phenomenal/perceptual) experience, any intelligible description of a phenomenal event must presuppose its existence. This requirement introduces an absolutely irreconcilable gap between descriptive systems used to describe, say, a neurological synthesis of sensory perceptions, and Ultimate Reality as a timeless field of probabilities. Attempts to describe one in terms of the other will inevitably lead us into an inescapble, labrynthine tangle of language games.