I remember when time began. There was no digital read-out, no hands pointing to numbers. There were trees, rocks and grass filled clearings. Days and nights were divided into moments of sun brightness and moon phases. The only understanding of time came from seasonal weather or perhaps the likelihood of sunburn when the sun blazed directly overhead. Numbers were just on the edge of consciousness. The ideas of few and many were desperately trying to achieve worth but they wouldn’t gain meaning until huts came along. The only calendar consisted of the difficulty of finding food in the winter and edible plants in the summer. Insects hadn’t been discovered yet. Eyes able to spot them were still a few hundred millennia away. But cooperation between different families and clans was gaining enough momentum to give birth to time. There was just enough vocabulary of sound and body language to create a concept of voluntarily meeting with someone else. And a couple hundred years later a concept of voluntarily meeting someone else when the shade of a tree was on a particular rock. And someday in the distant future, a sun dial. To this very day, all times of day can be boiled down to a reason for meeting someone. Statistics only appear when you add math and if your adding math to a time it’s because you plan on showing the resulting statists to someone at some point.
No. That’s not quite right. I was absolutely certain I could hear time. Every clock on the planet ticking at exactly the same time. Obviously during the Renaissance, but just a flashback. I still can’t separate time from a meeting place. Why bother to delineate time into minutes by yourself? It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable result of being alone. You eat when you’re hungry. You sleep when you’re tired. You wake when the sun brightens the day. And planning for the future? To the MINUTE?!! That’s absurd without tech.
So take the clock apart. Numbers seem like a natural progression beginning with an awareness of amount. Imagine having a desire to obtain or create a comfortable chair. Is it going to be big like a recliner or smaller like a stool? Having an ability to count your footsteps as you cross the part of the floor where the chair is going to be improves your awareness of just how much chair you want.
Perhaps minutes live somewhere in organization. But if you’re well organized you develop a routine, a behavior. Putting aside one project or task for the day to continue with another doesn’t require an exact end point. Doing so would just create stress. On the reverse of that, aiming to spend a specific period of time on one thing and a different period of time on another seems like the perfect tool for the disorganized person. But how did the temporal delineation get there to begin with? The organized person doesn’t need it and the disorganized person would have to embody the definition of a masochist in order to invent the system to punish himself.
Scaling time doesn’t make sense until a social aspect is included with the scale. Time willed itself into existence or it started at a meeting place. Adding magnets to time gives it a very realistic computerized simulation of being animate. But it’s a simulation. Time has no more of an ability to exert it’s will than a flower has the ability to learn a second language. And it least the flower exhibits an animate form of life.
I’m agnostic. I consider the idea that an all powerful deity created everything as absurd as the Big Bang Theory. Science is an extremely accurate system of measuring and describing the universe but it is and will always be nothing more than the best estimate. If classical physics is ever united with quantum mechanics in a complete theory of everything, I’ll print this out on paper and eat my words. Right after I flap my arms and take flight.