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Originally Posted by spongy
Time as a human invention? And this makes it not a force of nature?
I'm not sure I follow this reasoning.
Aren't numbers and letters human inventions? Does that lessen their impact on our lives?
I would argue that time is something measurable the fact that we have units of time.. minutes seconds, millenia take your pick shows that it exists. Why is a tree more real than an hour and a half. I was born. I am now middleages/38/halfway through current life expaectancy.. doesn't this prove that time exists?
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I think I see what Analog was trying to say (or maybe not)...
Time is a perception developed by humans. It may or may not be linear as we perceive it. Look at the radio spectrum. We know microwave exists (now) and that VHF and UHF exist (though the names of all of the above are useless in this sense). However, we can only physically detect the 'visible light' portion of that spectrum. Most people, even a lot of educated people, can't grasp the concept that the color red (as it's perceived) and the signal sent to their radio is the SAME thing, one's just "wider" than the other. Sound is in there too... and we can detect that. Other creatures can detect pieces of that that we cannot (bats, bees, etc.)
In other words, yes... time is "natural", but our perception of it may be extremely limited in the grand scope of things.