Timekeeping Devices

Whether a vertical stick in the ground (a basic sundial) or an hourglass or a stationary electric clock or a mechanical wristwatch, timekeeping devices would all just be objects in, or constructed using materials from, the external world, a world in which perceived phenomena occur whether or not one is tracking time in units mentally or by any device at all.  The wood or water (for a water clock) or wax (for a candle clock) or glass or metal comes from the natural world, often through the artificial crafting of the raw materials, and might be specifically utilized to parallel natural cycles like that of day and night.  None of these time-telling items are the day-night cycle or sequential events in time like the falling of leaves, but no physical phenomenon is time itself.

What exactly is it that timekeeping devices measure?  They are used to either tell where someone is in the day-night cycle, such as by showing where an outdoor, daylight shadow would fall on the ground with a sundial (as reportedly used by societies like Ancient Egypt or the Greek city-states), or they track arbitrary units of time like contemporary minutes, such as with a digital watch.  Now, clocks hang on many of our walls, are on our handheld electronic devices, and adorn our wrists, and some people might take the ability to see the alleged time of day for granted.  The very units of time, mentioned in conversation frequently, are also assumed by some of these people to be something more than random measurements with arbitrary linguistic terms assigned to them.

Seconds, minutes, and hours, the common units of time around much of the world, could have had very different words and, for the most part, units.  The thing being measured is objective.  Like geographical/geological distance, time cannot be divided into units unless it exists.  It can be known with absolute certainty that the present moment exists, though the duration of the past and future are unverifiable in an ultimate sense.  By the time one has reflected on it, it has slipped away, replaced by a new present moment (and thus the past has existed for at least a moment at any point).  The classification of 60 seconds/moments in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day, however, is a social construct, just as timekeeping devices are constructs that must be created to measure time even as time is already there.

The same amount of time passes in a finite period no matter what it is classified as linguistically or whatever categories and subcategories the units have.  Time also elapses regardless of whatever device is used to track it or if any device is used at all.  Moments pass, acknowledged or not, understood or not by the people living in them, whether the flowing of water from one bowl to the next or the melting of a candlestick with markers or the ticking of a mechanism is set up.  Events, including the movement of celestial bodies and watch hands, have time as a prerequisite, but the inverse is not true.

However advanced or easily accessible contemporary timepieces are, the nature of time and the distinction between material construct (eg, a clock), cultural construct (units of measurement and the language for them), subjective perception of time (chronoception), and actual time are blatant for any willing rationalist.  Timekeeping means have come a long way according to the historical record.  Modern watches unite portability and thus convenience and can still feature additional complications, which are additions to the face that do more than just tell the basic time (like highlight the day of the month, for instance).  Electronic or not, there is almost always one timekeeping device or another in a home or that some has easy access to.

Still, these belongings are not the same as time units; they cannot be the same thing they measure.  Units of time themselves are in turn not time itself.  Again, a thing cannot be what it measures.  A timekeeping device of any form is not time because for the same reason a sensory perception could not be the same as the seeming stimulus it perceives.  One's subjective experience with time, the units for it, the words for those units, and the physical objects that measure its passing are not the elapsing of time.  They are not the duration that is logically required for natural phenomena to occur (there could be no sequence of causality or events without objective metaphysical time) but that could exist in their absence.