Please someone explain to me how time is man made?

But a year is 365 days (except for leap years, of course).

Originally posted by NRen2k5
But a year is 365 days (except for leap years, of course).

your right, but what may be the case is that in ancient times the number 360(or 366) was accepted.

which would explain alot of geometric rulings. we adhere to the 360 degree compass. and ancient times were notorious for there unwavering alliance to geometry.


lets suppose a year was represented by a hexagon(6). a winter, a summer, and the transition periods between them. which would give each "zone" 60 days, but like the day it can be divided into two distinct parts(entry and exit). which would create 12 months(2months = 1zone), then 12 zodiacs were given to represent each month.

EDIT: what probably happened is 12 zodiac were given, then the 6 zones were abandoned(by ignorance?) and the 12 was kept, createing 12 months.

so 6 may not be a chosen number but a number of realization, being that it was possible to divide a year into 6 equal parts.

what doesn't fit for me is the 24 hours of a day. but im certain this measurement was not made by the culture that found the number 6. most undoubtedly constructed by an inferior intellectual society, but kept the value of 6 still apparent.

NOTE: im not trying to rewrite history, im just saying that things tend to progress in a like manner. and this seems plausible.

my main point is that the measurement of time was a form of "division" not multiplication/addition. the year and day are fixed(so to speak). the subdivisions are purely chosen. if the measurement of time had been developed during the rise of the metric system, certainly we would have a base of 10.



[edit on 3/9/07 by Glyph_D]

I've been away from the forum for a couple of non-existant days so I haven't been aware of Astyanax's interesting post, which I want to devote some time to, some minutes, or only seconds perhaps, since seconds exist even less than minutes.

As far as science's blunder goes, (i.e., the presumption of the existence of time,) whenever the consideration of time travel, even as an amusing theoretical game arises among physicists, or when the clock slowing example at elevated velocities is mentioned, I assume an acceptance of the notion that time exists, that is, has ontological status. Maybe I'm mistaken in that. Maybe physicists simply regard "time" as what I said it was, a conceptualization. If so then we can take some hammers out of the bag.

When discussing Einstein, I've come to the conclusion that he is best understood as a conceptualist. In the past I've heard Max Plank quoted as having said that science has nothing to do with nature. That is a very important point and a sophisticated statement. If he indeed did say that or write it and if he believed it, it means that he understood that
everything scientific is conceptual, an approximation, a description, more or less sketchy of nature.

Science is a collection of statements of our understanding of nature. It's about our understanding. It's the way we translate natural phenomena into terms that allow us to deal with it, make sense of it to ourselves and quite often exploit it for our own benefit. It is all conceptions.

My quarrel with much of what I hear from scientists is that from the beginning of science, they have endowed their ideas and
theoretical discoveries with more weight than they really deserve. Repressive orthodoxies develop and science becomes loaded with all the baggage of politics and money.

However, real scientists, of the order of Einstein, are usually much less doctrinaire about their ideas. One of Einstein's laments was that after a lifetime of contempt for authority, his fate was to become an authority himself. My disagreement is really with the world of academic science, the science parrots, the arguers from authority, who put a damper on many original thinkers.

Over the centuries science has moved from casual observation of the natural world, following chains of logic, aided by experimentation and conceptualization, deeper and deeper into a complex understanding of the natural world's manifestations. The goals have been understanding, prediction and exploitation. To a large extent science has achieved those goals.

Quantum mechanics brought us into a conceptual neighbourhood that was very difficult to understand, indeed that might not be understandable except in the context of logics with new rules. This was too much for Einstein. His famous assertion that God didn't play dice with the universe implies a lot about his "worldview." (The word neo-newtonian comes to mind.)

This was the utterance of an authority, of a being of the sort that Einstein himself had always had contempt for. Was this the non-existent moment that the age of Einstein came to an end? Max Plank's response, an injunction that Einstein ought not to be telling God what to do, is very witty, and actually quite germane to our discussion, because it's a warning of sorts about taking conceptualizations too seriously. The most serious type of seriousness being to give them ontological status, i.e. to really believe that they refer to reality.

But this begs the question, "What can we take seriously?" In the history of science there have been numerous revisions of what we thought "stuff" was. At all of those junctures most people realized that their previous notion had not been "real", but only a conception that had been useful as a stepping stone to the current notion, the "real" notion, the current real fact of what stuff is is thought to be. Of course the cycle repeated again and again, numerous times.

That brings us to spacetime. I say that it's a conception. It doesn't exist. Why? Because space is a limitless void without characteristics. Space can't be in a continuum with anything. All it can do is contain everything, although it doesn't work very hard at it. In fact no effort is involved at all. Space and time are in a continuum only within the context of Einstein's scientific conceptions.

The Einsteinian universe is a universe like a set. Einsteinian space is the space confined by that universe. That space is a subset of what we might call philosophical space. Philosophical space is the "real" space. Of course assigning reality to something that by definition has no characteristics is a debatable decision, but that's another discussion. The size of Einsteinian space can be computed within the context of his conceptual calculus.

The expansion of the Einsteinian universe is something that current physicists are coming to grips with. I'm not sure the jury is in yet about whether Einstein's conceptions have satisfactorily accounted for this. However the main point I'm trying to make is that Einsteinian time, Einstein space and the space time continuum are elements of a conceptual theory expressed in mathematics. They are concepts, they are used in a descriptive manner and they don't tell you very much about the "reality" of anything. In your post you make reference to more subtle theoretical descriptions. I personally believe that science will falter long before it gets close to the doorstep of empty space itself.

As far as time goes, I assert that it has no reality even in a Newtonian sense. Where is the "timestuff"? Time is a mental conception. Boredom is a mental feeling that arise from lack of stimulation. We say that time passes slowly, or that time sped by. Both situations are mental states relative to whether our minds are stimulated or not. In fact although put as references to time, time has nothing to do with these observations except as a conceptual reference.

So many osscillations of a crystal occured during a boring class when time went so slowly and the same number ocurred during a stimulating class with a favourite teacher when time went by twice as fast. Our judgement of time in both cases wasn't based on time at all.

(End of part one of two.)

Nobody has contacted time in the history of the universe. Time doesn't exist except as a concept. It is like a poetic word for a total number of osscillations. Does time extend into the future? That means it grows, that means it adds to itself. Where does this new time come from? What is the physical process of it's production? It must be a composite, in order to undergo alteration. That means it must be composed of stuff which is not time but which in combination produces time. If that is the case then there is no time itself. Time becomes a name for something that we attach to a composite of other things. One should not be doctrinaire, but I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever for timestuff.

In a philosophical sense there are only two ultimate realities, endless space and an unending now. That's why I think that science blunders if it assigns time an ontological status. To say that time dilation is a consequence of special relativity is very accurate. It certainly isn't a consequence of any natural process, that's my whole point. I'm suggesting that experiments that confirm time dilation do not do so, but do confirm an alteration of physical processes associated with differing velocities. I reassert that time dilation is indeed a "doofer", because it is the only evidential referent available to the experimenters and it is a purely conceptual one.

I'm just saying that time is a fabrication of the human mind and that it has less "reality" than "philosophical" space. Time is like the dollar, an artificial construction, valuless in itself, but quite useful by common consent.

(End of part two of two)

reply to post by ipsedixit
Thanks for taking the time to reply at length. I'm sorry to say I found nothing new in your latest posts, though; you've made those points already. And I have already addressed them.

I do, however, have two questions.

1. You speak of physical space as a subset of 'philosophical space'. Could you describe some of the characteristics of philosophical space? Does it exist outside the minds of philosophers?
   
   
2. Why do you consider it more economical to multiply entities by introducing an unknown physical force to explain time dilation rather than viewing it as a characteristic of time?
   

A lot of this metaphysical stuff is way over my head so I'll simplify things a bit. My "proof" of why I believe man did not create time:

Time is the 4th dimension. You have 3-dimensional objects, but without time they're all frozen in place. For movement to happen you need time. There was movement and time long before man appeared on the scene. Therefore man could not have created time, we only measure it.

Reply to Astyanax:

First of all thanks for your continuing civility and even temper. I respect and appreciate that. I was re-reading my previous lengthly post and thinking to myself that I can be quite a windbag at times and I want to thank you for not taking exception to that.

Part of my motiviation for detailing some things in that post was to speak to the OP's original request and to try however inadequately to fill in some of the backround so as to explain how someone could, I think reasonably, hold such peculiar views as my own.

Your first question regarding the characteristics of "philosophical space" is at once simple and daunting. Philosophical space is a limitless void without characteristics, except for limitlessness and voidness. If you were mugged by philosophical space those two descriptors wouldn't be of much use to the police.

For many years now, ever since the ramifications of Einstein's conceptions began to be appreciated, there has been much to do made of "the universe", it's size, shape, effect on the trajectory of light, etc. In my view what people don't appreciate is that the Einsteinian "universe" is not the philosophical universe, it is simply the universe inferred from Einstein's equations.

The philosophical universe is much bigger. And sure enough as time has gone by we have been informed by science that there may be other "universes" outside our own. These are assumed to be other Einsteinian universes but some physicists speculate that other kinds of physical laws might prevail in these places.

Leaving philosophy aside, if one were a scientific generalist, one might speculate that there might be some kind of superspace out there, capable of containing numerous universes. There might be some kind of super physics, whose dynamic principles might allow for such a thing. This kind of speculation could have an infinite number of recursions.

Where is all this going to take place? Some philosophers intuit an infinite space, devoid of characteristics except for limitlessness and voidness. This intuition is like the fundamental intuitions of mathematics, 1=1, etc.

Challenging those sorts of intuitions is to challenge our ability to think at all. One assumes certain self evident axioms. They are self evident to minds like ours. When they are not self evident to someone, we suspect mental illness or physical impairment.

What I call "philosophical space" is a fundamental intuition of a fundamental reality, like 1=1. Unlike 1=1, however, philosophical space has a major religious ramification that does much to explain why many people do not want to do much thinking about it.

It curtails the reputed limitless attributes of that well known and
colourful personality, God.

Let me finish off by saying that attention to fundamental axioms is by no means a trivial pursuit. Science sails along on a barge built by philosophers. They continue to labour in the engine room and patch up leaks or draw attention to them when they are discovered, so that science and humanity can sail on to distant shores as safely as possible.

On to the second question:

Why do you consider it more economical to multiply entities by introducing an unknown physical force to explain time dilation rather than viewing it as a characteristic of time?

You have to remember that I don't think that time exists other than as a concept and therefore it's dilation as a result of a physical process simply doesn't come up as a possibility. My question to myself is what would lead science to start ascribing physical characteristics to a substance of which they have never produced an example.

Einstein is the most famous exponent of thought experiments. He's a charter member of the "if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, then for all intents and purposes it ought to be considered a duck" school of speculative thought.

There is a tremendous amount to be said for this approach. It definitely cuts through the BS and provides ample justification for proceeding in theory and practice in situations where conventional norms and doubts might hinder one.

Thus, science as a result of experimentation to confirm the prediction of a thought experiment, takes a look at the clock (of whatever sort) and concludes, "Gosh darn it, time IS dilating." The problem from the philosopher's point of view is that clocks don't measure time.

Clocks are counters. They count mechanical processes, or physical processes like clicks on a gear wheel, osscillations of crystals, pulsings of stars or the release of products of radioactive decay, etc. People believe that these processes all refer to time, but they only refer to a myriad of other physical processes to which they are constantly and often neurotically (I'm late for my dentist appointment!) compared.

Consequently, experiments thought to confirm "time dilation", are in reality (and I use the word advisedly) confirming an alteration in
physical processes. Time doesn't enter the picture except as an exercise of the imagination. I think that taking time too seriously is a red herring in physics.





[edit on 5-9-2007 by ipsedixit]

There is only interaction. A year is a year because man says it's a year. It is a label man has applied to identify interaction and occurence.

um, there can be a new rule that says a whole earth year is 24 earth hours...

you do know that daylight savings time is man made, right???

that's the best way to explain it

reply to post by ipsedixit

Thank you for your reply; it illustrates our philosophical differences very well.

Your answer to my first question is problematic for me, since it conflates mental and physical space. I understand that, as a type of idealist, you have no such problem.

People like myself will contend that the model of 'reality' generated by the brain is purely representational, and is so in a particular schema that is common to all normally functioning human brains. This schema is the product of human evolution; it is part of our phenotype.

It is thus tautological to state that the human picture of 'reality' is a 'realistic' description of what's out there (excepting only perceptual lacunae). It must be accurate in terms of how a human perceives reality, but that's about all. What 'reality' is really like is a meaningless question without the context of experience, and it alters with changes in context. A turtle with four types of colour-sensing cones in its retina will see a different reality from a human with three.

What is not seriously in doubt, as far as I am concerned, is that there is an external reality of some kind, occupied by humans and turtles alike, which modulates its own representation in their brains along lines prescribed by their respective schema.

Our capacity for abstract thought (another evolved phenotypic trait) allows us to modify our representational models in ways that extend or distort them, and even to devise alternative (if somewhat impoverished) models -- Dante's universe of The Divine Comedy, the Hindu-Buddhist cosmology centred on Mount Meru... string theory, parallel universes with different fundamental constants, many-worlds interpretations of quantum phenomena, and so on. To call them impoverished is not to denigrate the achievements, the hard work and inspiration, often the genius, of those who gave them form; I am merely comparing unfavourably their richness of detail, consistency and downright realness to those of the inherited (Newtonian, sense-derived, etc.) representational model. This defecit is only to be expected. We humans shall always, instinctively regard that representation as more 'really real', because that is how we have evolved to regard it.

It is a shorter step from this to what you hint at -- God as the ultimate Reality -- than you might think. If 'human reality' is a model deterministically created by the sum of all environmental factors (the sum of all causes) affecting the organism at a given instant ('real reality'), then surely it makes some sense to call this latter, universal reality God. After all, it simultaneously creates us (the illusory audience in the Cartesian Theatre) and 'reality' (the Cartesian play itself). It is deterministic on a macroscopic level, thus chiming well with Aristotelian ideas about a hierarchy of causes leading back to the First Cause, and non-deterministic at the quantum level (making it ultimately unknowable and unpredictable -- useful traits for a deity to possess, as I am sure you will agree).

Short as this step is, however, it would be foolish to take it, since we would then have to posit an infinite regression of Gods, each more complex and hard to bring into existence than its predecessor, and end up explaining nothing.

As to your second answer, I flatly disagree. You're making up an external cause (not a 'force'; a force is a precisely defined thing in mechanics, and it is not the thing we are discussing here) to explain time dilation instead of seeing it as a fundamental property of spacetime. You are violating Occam's Razor, and you are only doing this because you don't want to accept that time is real. That, in turn, is simply a consequence of your philosophical views. If I were you, I should regard such mental contrivances as evidence that my views needed re-adjusting in the light of... well, reality... and proceed accordingly.

[edit on 6-9-2007 by Astyanax]

Reply to Astyanax:

Thanks for your response. As I read it I began to wonder if we are a case of two ships passing in the, if not darkness, then certainly twilight. I'm not sure if I've been understood and I'm not sure if that is not my own fault.

One of the problems of a forum like this is the necessity to be concise and precise. More extended explanations that might make meaning perfectly clear and obvious aren't looked for in this type of interaction. I think I might have done better to have given some points a bigger word count.

Just to clarify one point in my first answer. I don't personally believe in God and I believe the fact of "philosophical space" precludes his existence unless his agents here on earth would be willing to negotiate a demotion for him ("creator emeritus" of the universe perhaps.) Of course he would carry on at the same rate of pay.

As I re-read my last post I thought that the most outrageous statement in it was the one stating that "clocks don't measure time." I'm surprised you didn't pick up on that one for specific rebuttal. In my highschool science
class, saying that clocks don't measure time, would create just the sort of uproar that teenage intellectual hooligans love to stimulate.

In this post, which will likely be my last in this thread, I want to go into a little more detail about the subject of clocks. Clocks are the Achilles heel of Einteinian physics. If you clobber clocks you simultaneously "clock" the
old professor. (Incidentally, believe me when I say that I adore Einstein and his achievement. I'm a huge fan of his.)

To be concise and precise, the main point about clocks is that they are entirely self referential. They don't actually measure anything. They are simply calibrated in one of many ways and cycles of calibrations are simply counted up. These totals are compared to totals of natural events.

For the benefit of the general reader here is a list of possible calibrating references: sun rises, phases of the moon, waking and sleeping, breathing, the heartbeat, the menstrual cycle, footsteps when walking, waves on the shore, movement of shadows in sunlight.

These are what we would call primitive calibrating references. They don't meet the standards of accuracy that radioactive decay, osscillations of crystals, or pulsing stars furnish, but the principle of their application is exactly the same.

The reason I mention this is that since the time of the most primitive man and his early attemps to measure "time", we have made better and better and better clocks, but we have made not one single advance in connecting these devices to the object of their stated purpose.

When we measure something with a ruler, we put the ruler next to it. The measured object is present before us. There is no doubt of it's presence. When we measure time with a clock, we have no way of knowing if time is present or not. A clock is the only measuring device in the world that is not required to have some kind of contact with the "object" it is measuring. This is a subtle, non-trivial point.

Let me elaborate. When we look at a clock, we see the hands of the clock move. They go round round the dial and we start to get bored, we start to get tired, we start to get hungry. What has happened? Mechanical events in the clock have occurred. Physical and mental events in our bodies have occurred. Has "time" passed?

Most people would say yes, but the events, mechanical and physical, referred to, are entirely explicable within a context of their own, without reference to "time." We don't have a measuring device that can detect the
influence of time in these events.

If such a device existed then we could do away with clocks, because we would actually have a device that must have some contact with time. We are so distant from our original creation of time that we have forgotten how we created it in the first place.

Strictly speaking clocks don't measure time, they create it. They are devices which produce events that we know are sequentially identical. We compare events occurring in the natural world to the events produced by our artificial devices to see how many of one event will take place as the other sort of event is taking place. Thus begins the construction of the edifice of time, a completely man made record composed of numerous comparisons.

It is very difficult to discuss these things without falling into the jargon we use everyday in commonly talking about time. That is a testimony to how deeply ingrained in our minds the concept of time is, how important it is and correspondingly, how useful it is to us. Be that as it may, I think that unwarranted assumptions and presumptions have been made about time by people in general, including Einstein.

In a nutshell, clocks are self referential. They don't do anything but count their own calibrated cycles.

Time is an illusion of 5th dimension. It's a pleasure device, an indulgence created by aliens to prolong a theme ride.

My .2c

Time to move on

Originally posted by ipsedixit
I thought that the most outrageous statement in (my last post) was the one stating that "clocks don't measure time." I'm surprised you didn't pick up on that one for specific rebuttal.

As I said earlier, I am agnostic about time -- though inclined to believe, as I am inclined to accept the evidence of my senses.

In this post, which will likely be my last in this thread, I want to go into a little more detail about the subject of clocks.

A pity you're leaving, but I agree that we have probably taken this as far as it makes sense to go. Time to move on beyond.

Though as for clocks:

(Here are some) possible calibrating references: ...waking and sleeping, breathing, the heartbeat, the menstrual cycle...

These are, as you point out, useless for accurate calibration. But more interestingly, they are examples or outcomes of processes -- measurable changes in the physical states of various objects over... what? If they are not state changes over time, how can states change at all? A change of state in an object can only be observed by comparison with a different state of the same object. If an example of a different state is no longer available, how can we say that anything has changed? Yet our senses and sensors tell us something has. How could this be, if time is a human artifact and all we have is an eternal Now?

We have made better and better and better clocks, but we have made not one single advance in connecting these devices to the object of their stated purpose... When we measure something with a ruler, we put the ruler next to it... When we measure time with a clock, we have no way of knowing if time is present or not. A clock is the only measuring device in the world that is not required to have some kind of contact with the "object" it is measuring.

When you measure space with a ruler, do you put the ruler 'next to' space? Of course you don't. The ruler is already in space. You put it next to a sheet of paper, a length of string, a mortadella sausage or whatever it is you want to measure. You are measuring the spatial quality of the object, not space itself.

Similarly, when you measure elapsed time with a clock, you don't put time next to the clock. The clock is already in time -- submerged in it as it is in space. What you measure is the duration of a particular process -- how long it takes for the Sun to go round the earth, or for that sausage to digest.

We see the hands of the clock move. They go round round the dial and we start to get bored, we start to get tired, we start to get hungry. What has happened? Mechanical events in the clock have occurred. Physical and mental events in our bodies have occurred. Has "time" passed?

Yes. The universe has perceptibly changed its state.

Most people would say yes, but the events, mechanical and physical, referred to, are entirely explicable within a context of their own, without reference to "time."

I would love to hear such an explanation.

We don't have a measuring device that can detect the influence of time in these events.

And there's the fallacy. You assume that, simply because the state of a system has changed over time, time must be the agency of that change. That is hopelessly wrong. Time is the arena in which change takes place, but it is no more the agent of that change that the Coliseum was the agent of the persecution of Christians by the Roman authorities under Nero.

[edit on 7-9-2007 by Astyanax]

Wanted: a new formal logic for a post-Einsteinian world

My little debate with ipsedixit got me curious about philosophical approaches to time, so I did some reading. Only a few well-known philosophers seem to have agreed with him that time does not exist: principally Liebniz, who also denied the ultimate existence of space as a consequence of his philosophy of monads, but also McTaggart in the early twentieth century, building on the work of F.H. Bradley.

I freely confess I don't understand Liebniz's philosophy of 'monadism', but one thing is clear: it is an attempt to understand reality through the application of logic, not necessarily mediated by sensory experience. In a very different way, Bradley and McTaggart used the tools of logic to 'show' that not only are time and space imaginary, but a whole lot of other things don't exist either. Actually, what these chaps did was follow the lines of reasoning taken up by earlier philosophers, identify the logical inconsistencies, and show that, due to these errors, their epistemological conclusions were wrong -- and that once the errors were corrected, their arguments actually proved that time, space, etc. did not exist. However, they were unable to reconcile these logical conclusions with the evident fact that space and time appear real to human beings and that it is practically impossible to say anything meaningful about anything at all without reference to them. Their work, though taken seriously in their time, was essentially no more than a logical party trick -- look, they said, logic says this is how things are (or are not); so much the worse for our perceptions of reality if they do not conform to logic.

But objective reality, for a materialist like myself, must always have the last word. These men may have produced unanswerable logical arguments against it, but they are still wrong. Solipsism (the position that the universe is an illusion created by the mind) is likewise logically unassailable, yet no-one would insist that it reflects reality.

It seems to me that what these philosophers have really proved is that logic, like Newtonian mechanics, works well when we apply it in day-to-day thinking, to ideas and entities on the human scale, but just like Newtonian mechanics, it has limitations in certain extreme cases, such as when we apply it to questions about the fundamental nature of reality.

Just as we need other systems of mechanics to explain the physical world of the very large and the very small (relativistic and quantum mechanics, respectively), we may need to devise a new formal logic (perhaps more than one) to deal with fundamental questions about reality.

[edit on 8-9-2007 by Astyanax]

"That's not fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"

Hubert J. Farnsworth, New New York, sometime in the 31st century

Originally posted by Lannock
A lot of this metaphysical stuff is way over my head so I'll simplify things a bit. My "proof" of why I believe man did not create time:

Time is the 4th dimension. You have 3-dimensional objects, but without time they're all frozen in place. For movement to happen you need time. There was movement and time long before man appeared on the scene. Therefore man could not have created time, we only measure it.

i'm with you on that...

but a more precise 4th dimension would be 'time-space' as an interwoven unit.

in our local, microcosim of the world, we only need the 3 dimensions H-L-W
but in the macrocosim of the universe, w need to comprehend the combined 4 dimensions H-L-W + space/time.

besides the Bible fundamentalists will point out that the creator
was the creator of 'time' as he began the event & duration & named the
1st division of 'time' calling it a 'Day',
and strung 7 of these 'Days' together for the concept of a 'week'
as a standard & guideline for all future mankind to follow.

Time is a concept created by our ancestors that everyone just accepts as a reality.
There is a constant flow to reality, but because we are on a planet that has a cyclical climate, our ancestors divided it into seasons that expressed the cycles for growing crops and for staying warm inside. Since these seasons happened at pretty much the same time, they were studied and the number of days(light/dark cycles) counted. They discovered that the moon was in a certain place during the longest and shortest days, and that the days between them were the same number each time. They then gave the period from the longest day to the longest day a name. They divided the year into moons and clocked reality by the rising of the full moon. Later, rulers changed the count of days into months and artisans built clocks to divide days into hours and minutes.
However, if we lived on a planet with a circular orbit and no planetary tilt, we would have no seasons. If there was no moon, or if it was geostationary, there would be no lunar cycle. With no cyclic action in the flow of reality to foster the idea, there would be no time. Reality would pass for the inhabitants with light and dark cycles. There might be the concept of yesterday, today and tomorrow. There would be the knowledge that crops need to grow, mature and ripen. But would there be a concept of time? Perhaps a counting of days, but with no impetus to divide reality into manageable bite sizes I don't think that they would develop the concept of time, at least not as we have.
I live without time for the most part, only using it when I need to interact with structured enviroments. I find it a much more civil way of life.

Hello,

This is a first real post for me, but I thought I might add a thought to this subject. I was once in a parenting class, and learned that children do not understand the concept of time until about age 5. They said, for a child, 5 minutes can seem like much longer or shorter, depending on what that child is thinking about or doing. A child is not focused on "what is going to happen later", but instead, a child usually thinks about "what is going on right now". Think about when you were a child, and try for a moment to remember what your life was like without understanding time.

My post is not presented to answer any question, but rather to provoke thought and to add to this discussion.

reply to post by quiescence

You may well be right. I can't say I have memories of an eternal present, but I certainly do remember that time used to pass more slowly when I was a child. Of course our temporal perceptions are always changing -- time flies when you're having fun, etc. -- but I mean something different; all time seemed slower, all the time.

Moreover, I have a distinct memory of discussing this with some of my friends when we were about twelve or thirteen. We all agreed that time had passed more slowly for us when we were little, and was now beginning to move faster. One of us suggested it might be because we had lived longer; a second or an hour were shorter in comparison to the full length of our lives than they were years ago. I still think this is probably true.

That is a very interesting way of looking at it... and I too do remember thinking about time in that way when I was younger, after I was able to understand the concept. I found a page that I thought was interesting, and talks a little about this subject... Here is some of what it says....

We see colours, hear sounds and feel textures. Some aspects of the world, it seems, are perceived through a particular sense. Others, like shape, are perceived through more than one sense. But what sense or senses do we use when perceiving time? It is certainly not associated with one particular sense. In fact, it seems odd to say that we see, hear or touch time passing. And indeed, even if all our senses were prevented from functioning for a while, we could still notice the passing of time through the changing pattern of our thought. Perhaps, then, we have a special faculty, distinct from the five senses, for detecting time. Or perhaps, as seems more likely, we notice time through perception of other things. But how?

Also, this is the page that I found it on...

plato.stanford.edu...


The link provides various philosophical theories and ideas to think about....