How do you think the world would be if we hadn’t come up with the human concept of time?

[BritneyPeedOnALadybug]

Random question, just as the title asks 🧐

Depends what you mean by time, and how that differs from seasons or natural cycles or perceptions of change, I think.

I think the idea that we all experience time in the same measurable way (so five minutes for me is the same as five minutes for you) is part of what makes us compare to other people and presume there's one 'right' answer to everything.

I think the idea that we all experience time in the same measurable way (so five minutes for me is the same as five minutes for you) is part of what makes us compare to other people and presume there's one 'right' answer to everything.

Right, but if there wasn’t a concept of time it wouldn’t be the same for everyone surely? Even with the time concept, two people can have very different perceptions of it, I.e. someone’s “today went so fast” compared to someone else’s “today is dragging so slowly”.

^^reading back, I think I may have misunderstood your reply @SarahAndQuack

I remember chatting to a bloke in Africa about this. He was bemused (and sympathetic) that we were woken in the dark to go to work and sometimes worked for hours in the dark. Poor us. The sun woke him and that's when he started. I felt quite sorry for me too.

I think it would be impossible for humans to have observed the rising and gradual setting of the sun and not to have come up with the concept of time tbh. And I don't think that an absence of measuring time would mean that we'd all somehow be less judgemental and more accepting of others' perception of time. It would just be incredibly annoying and inconvenient trying to plan anything! Which is presumably why we invented it.

Natural

The revolve round the sun, the sun moves, the moon moves. Eventually they used a sundial. There are seasons. You need to sleep. Seems sensible to sleep at night, when it's harder to hunt because of darkness. So I don't see how you can ever get away from the concept of time.

Time isn't a concept though. It's a physical reality.

Chaotic

@BIWI
Time isn't a concept though. It's a physical reality.

Is it? Says who?

There's so many different ways of answering this question. Time is totally a human concept. No other being in the planet marks time and the passage of time the way humans do.

Time in the UK was only unified when train travel became prevalent.

Fascinating BBC documentary about it.

Time when travelling by sea was vital. It's vital for our computers.

I think we'd be a lot more agrarian without time in the sense we have now.

Remember reading a memoir of a poor semi-rural family living in 19th century Ireland... They got up at dawn and went to bed when it got dark. Their summers must have been dramatically different to winters.

Because it's determined by the movement of the earth around the sun - daytime and night time, and the length of days.

Because it's determined by the movement of the earth around the sun - daytime and night time, and the length of days

Determined by humans, though? If there was no concept of time there wouldn’t be such things as “daytime” or “nighttime” as there wouldn’t be any official time and people would see it as light and dark

You mean how we measure time, rather than time itself? So not the passing of time but the fact that it's 16:17. The latter is a human concept but time itself is real.

Like the difference between earthquakes than the Richter scale.

Time exists because nothing lasts forever. If it did, there would be no time.

It would be a pain to wake/sleep in the places that get six months of daylight/six months of darkness!

A day (one rotation of the planet) would still happen whether we labelled it as a day or not.

@leghairdontcare
You mean how we measure time, rather than time itself? So not the passing of time but the fact that it's 16:17. The latter is a human concept but time itself is real.

More than that. We are a month into 2020. But says who? It’s 16:17 (but now 16:26 as I post this) but says who? In other parts of the world it’s a different time as I’m posting this right now. But says who?

@Tombakersscarf
A day (one rotation of the planet) would still happen whether we labelled it as a day or not.

That’s my question

That's not a question!

@tombakersscarf

“How do you think the world would be if we hadn’t come up with the human concept of time?”

^ That is!

I don't think you can say time is a physical reality.

OP, sorry I wasn't clear - I mean exactly what you're saying, that we all experience time differently, and had we not started measuring it, we'd probably organise all sorts of social relations differently.

There's a really interesting book by Elizabeth Freeman called 'Time Binds,' where she considers how time might be understood differently from the way we tend to understand it now. She argues that time is one of the way society is organised towards productivity, but that this is an artificial concept really.

I think grief is a good example of how complicated time is. I still can't grasp that there are people whom I love whom I will never see again in this life. They're entirely gone and in the past. How can that be?

Btw, just thinking about the 'time is a physical reality' argument - it's not so very different from when people imagined that it was a 'physical reality' that the sun revolved around the earth. I mean, they saw it. It was obvious. You could physically see the sun moving and the earth staying still.

A lot of the things we perceive aren't that trustworthy.

I'm not saying I imagine in the future we'll discover some big new truth that'll make us completely reinterpret how we understand time, but I do think we can't just say 'I saw x and concluded y, and therefore y is a physical reality independent of my observation'.

I think we wouldn’t be anywhere near as advanced as we are now. Defining time made it possible to communicate and trade in a much more efficient way. Eg; without a clock or any concept of time you could arrange to meet with someone in four days to do trade but you’d waste the whole day waiting around for them to arrive because there is no specific time to meet. Whereas with time you can agree to meet at 4pm meaning you can also arrange to meet other traders elsewhere or do more work at home etc. The saying “time is money” is relevant here. Without time life would be a lot slower and the advancement in technologies would be way behind where they are.

@SarahAndQuack Really interesting, thank you, and I’m going to seek out that book