Clocks And Time

Time is not one's sense of time, nor is it a physical thing that can be observed with one's sense of sight of grasped by one's hands.  Many of those who do not mistakenly equate time with their sense of time instead make the mistake of equating time with that which is used to measure time, namely, a device such as a clock.  This, in turn, leads to the belief that time itself is an invention of human society or even the individual human mind.

A clock is not the same thing as time, however, for the latter is not even made of matter at all.  Time can exist and pass without the presence of a physical world, but there cannot be events in the physical world without time.  In other words, time is a more metaphysically foundational thing that the external world itself is.  Matter and time could have come into existence simultaneously.  However, matter and its behaviors cannot precede time, even though the inverse is entirely possible.

A device like an hourglass or clock simply helps measure the passage of time and mark key intervals; it is not as if time does not exist without hourglasses or clocks!  Indeed, there would be nothing to measure with a clock if time did not already exist.  Time is not a construct of human civilization, but an existent which must already be present for there to even be a point to constructing devices for time measurement.

Time zones are human constructs, as are both the specific units used to measure time (seconds and hours could have been defined differently) and whatever physical objects are used to to mark the passing of time, but neither of these things are time itself.  There would still be such a thing as the present moment if humans had never built even pre-clock decices meant to track the passage of time.  Moments of time do not depend on physical creations.

To gaze at a clock is not the same as gazing into time, which is unseen and incapable of being directly grasped by any sense other than chronoception.  Even seeing changes in the material world as time elapses is not the same as seeing time, nor is it the same as seeing the effects of time, for time itself is not a causal force that makes events happen: time is the duration in which they happen.  There is an enormous metaphysical difference between these things.