The Passage Of Time

Without technological means of measuring time, one would be forced to use natural means of measuring time, which are inevitably tied to the position of the sun or other cosmological bodies in the sky.  After all, the day-night cycle only exists due to natural phenomena.  Technology merely helps people track specific times within the day-night cycle in accordance with time zones, even if time zones and the linguistic terms used to describe them are mere constructs of a given culture.  Whether the West primarily looked to natural or technological means of timekeeping, however, certain fallacious beliefs would likely persist.

If the Western world still relied on natural means of tracking time rather than artificial constructs of technology, a key philosophical mistake about the nature of time would likely not disappear.  Clocks and other timekeeping devices, even now, are sometimes confused for the things that ground time, as if time is a social or technological construct!  Emphasizing the natural signs of time's passage would probably not purge this mistake because the same error could simply be modified to fit the cosmological phenomena visible above.

The natural cycles of day and night correlated to the movement of celestial bodies, like clocks and other electronic devices, only indicate the passage of time; they do not create it.  The sun's light and its absence distinguish day from night, but day could not give way to night, or night to day, unless time already existed.  Time is a prerequisite for changes in the material world.  Neither physical events like the movement of the sun nor phenomenological events like the experience of one's sense of time bring time into existence!

A failure to grasp and utilize the abstract laws of logic often leads to a failure to understand how practical, everyday events and objects connect with explicitly philosophical truths about metaphysics.  It is only natural, then, that those who do not even understand the nature of basic logical axioms and epistemology can be easily coaxed into calling time a construct of the physical world, technology, society, or human consciousness.  Although these ideas differ in what time is attributed to, they all share the same fundamental weakness.

Time is merely a series of moments that elapses in tandem with the motion of celestial bodies, which is in turn divided into arbitrary units by humans and measured by timekeeping devices.  The person who sees the sun's light change in visibility from one point in the day to another and concludes that the natural day-night movements of cosmological bodies is time is just as delusional as the person who sees a clock and thinks a device meant to measure the passage of time somehow creates that which it measures.