Without consulting any sources for this post, I am hoping that we can reflect on the mysterious, fearful, but hopeful elements of time. I will speak from my thoughts and experiences only, and of course, look forward to hearing yours.
Where to Start
We can't imagine a universe without time.
It seems as if it is an essence that has been given to us since the first speck of life was created and that we cannot rid ourselves of. For anything to exist, time has to exist. In our daily lives, we tend to accept this fact because it makes sense. The way in which we approach time, though, is numerical.
We constantly live under the pressure of the numbers on our human made devices and look forward to the next event which is to happen at this said number. If an animal could suddenly gain the ability to speak and you were to ask it the next time it would eat, it might say something like "later" or "in the future." Thus, the first way in which we have tamed the wild concept of time, to try to understand its incomprehensible nature, is that we have ascribed numbers to it. Humans have the ability to reflect on time like no other organism can (to our knowledge).
Listen to this controversial statement: Time only exists because humans do. Sure, even if we wouldn't have our spot on earth, there would still be the passing of "time" where certain life forms would evolve and interact with one another. Even so, it would not be regarded as time because... there would be nothing to do the regarding! We would not be there to lay out the specificities and guidelines of time. Something new would be happening at every second— STOP—... I can't say second. That is an artificial unit created by humans. There would be change in the universe, but there would be nothing to, for instance, compare the difference between two entities across the span of time or point to a certain moment in time when a similar event happened.
Life without human thought would be a series of presents... of right-nows. There would be no one to label an event as the past, or identify a specific future. There would be no one to say: "A hundred years ago"— STOP—... I also can't say year if I want to make a convincing argument. Essentially, to recapitulate, the identification of time is only possible with the knowledge that human beings have. Dogs, for example, do not know that they are going to die. They can see another one of their species pass away, but do not recognize a pattern that repeats itself across "time." My phrasing is far from flawless, but I'm just pouring my ideas onto this post in a way that summarizes my conflicted thoughts about the subject.
Slightly More Chilling: The End of "Time"
Alright, so human beings have identified this so-called time, whether through calendars, clocks, or measuring devices, that they can use when they are living. But how do we account for the dead? For those who firmly believe that time continues after death, and that there is an afterlife, then the rest of this section can be disregarded. But for those who take a more scientific approach to the phenomenon, the question of time returns.
For the rest of eternity, when all that is in front of your eyes is an endless sea of darkness, is time passing for you? For the rest of humanity who is living, nothing has changed. As soon as you reach death, the inevitable end which so many writers have tried to define and write about, time stops. There is no more identifying, as I have explained in the previous section of this post. The problem with death is that you don't realize that you are dead. You know that you are living when you are in that state, but the second that "the lights turn off," you are unaware that you are no longer living... that there is a past, present, and a future. You cannot see the darkness that is in front of your eyes because your brain no longer identifies what time is. How do we account for this?
Perhaps this supports my above argument about how time is completely dependent on human thought. Once a human dies, so does their perception of time. Perhaps the death of a human does not signify the end of time for them because at first they are a few seconds (not stopping myself here!) after their time of death, and then a few years, and then a few thousands of centuries. There is a certain "time" between their two states, living and dying, because they created a system of time that defines the various moments that composed their life. A person who dies at the age of 80 years lived, according to the Gregorian calendar, 80 years. Thus, three days after their death, they are in a posthumous state of being that can be phrased as "three days following the moment of their death." Time continues for them, in some way, even if they are unable to realize it. However, the only reason that we can use such an expression as the one I said above is because there are other humans to account for this duration of time. Circling back to the beginning, it does seem like the manner of approaching time is entirely dependent on human thought.
Playing Devil's Advocate
Let's say that time exists without humans. Obviously, without humans, there would be no such thing as a second, month, year, or decade because no one would have defined them, but there would be some duration. There are two definitions for time in the Google Dictionary. One of them is "a point of time as measured in hours and minutes past midnight or noon," which is mainly the one that I have been addressing. The other, however, is as follows: "the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole."
I am not completely persuaded by the offered definition, but I will use it as my starting point. With it in mind, humans don't need to be here as long as something exists or something happens. Take any moment of time... let's use the moment of the Big Bang. Obviously, certain life forms evolved after the Big Bang. The word "after" signifies the future from the moment of the Bang. For the Bang to happen, two entities collided, meaning that there was a past from the present Bang. Well there we have it, it would seem. Continued progress of existence and events? Check. Past, present, future? Check. Regarded as a whole... Uh oh. We got it!
This goes back to the question which I posed above. Who is doing the regarding? Well, the sole answer is human beings! There is no other organism that considers past, present, and future in light of certain events which have transpired. Time is extremely scary to us when we think deeply about it because we are thinking deeply about it. No animal thinks about time, so it does not occur to them that it is a complex phenomenon that will end in absolute darkness (though we have found evidence of animals who know what death is, there is no emotional attachment to the process like humans have created. Burial rituals are, after all, what defined us as humans from our more primitive forms).
All of our idiosyncratic examinations into time stem from the fact that we are the only organism capable of doing it. Why does an "hour" feel so different if you are trying to beat your best time for a marathon compared to staring at a blank wall? The easy answer is that you are occupying your brain with activities, the hard answer is that time is a malleable entity that we can control in some ways. Since it is always there when we are alive, and it is a constant, we can forget it in some moments and deliberate on it in other moments. As a result, it comes back to how much we are regarding it in a certain moment, if we are to use the word from the dictionary definition.
My conclusion is that time only exists because humans do. Do you agree? Anything to say about my evidence? Shoot me a message and I will be happy to converse. I might even write a follow-up post if something you say intrigues me!
11/30/19