Time
First post of a new year. It has me contemplated the nature of time and the ways in which we measure it. Time has to be one of the most abstract concepts that we persist with as humans. It has no physical form - just the people,events and places we associate with it. It has no real purpose of its own, just the purpose we apply to it - being on time to meet someone or the moment a train will leave a station.
If we didn't measure time the way we do would we suffer in any way?
The Inca used to tie knots in pieces of string at regular intervals (based on the sun) to measure the time between events but then disposed of the string - they felt no need to record events in time on a daily basis. They did however excel at tracking events over thousands of years as we know with 2012 being the end of a 5500 year Inca calendar.
If we just removed time as a principle there would be short term anarchy while other ways of coordinating activities became apparent. As to the long term impacts I suspect that most of what we use time for would just become unimportant. Birthdays, anniversaries, recurring events - society got by without most of these things for longer than it has with them.
I'm sat looking at my calendar for the next 12 months trying to work out how to get a whole load of events and movements to work in conjunction with each other. It would be easier if these things had less importance, I'm speculating that they would be less important if we removed the notion of a fixed timetable from the background.
First post of a new year. It has me contemplated the nature of time and the ways in which we measure it. Time has to be one of the most abstract concepts that we persist with as humans. It has no physical form - just the people,events and places we associate with it. It has no real purpose of its own, just the purpose we apply to it - being on time to meet someone or the moment a train will leave a station.
If we didn't measure time the way we do would we suffer in any way?
The Inca used to tie knots in pieces of string at regular intervals (based on the sun) to measure the time between events but then disposed of the string - they felt no need to record events in time on a daily basis. They did however excel at tracking events over thousands of years as we know with 2012 being the end of a 5500 year Inca calendar.
If we just removed time as a principle there would be short term anarchy while other ways of coordinating activities became apparent. As to the long term impacts I suspect that most of what we use time for would just become unimportant. Birthdays, anniversaries, recurring events - society got by without most of these things for longer than it has with them.
I'm sat looking at my calendar for the next 12 months trying to work out how to get a whole load of events and movements to work in conjunction with each other. It would be easier if these things had less importance, I'm speculating that they would be less important if we removed the notion of a fixed timetable from the background.
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