Also, if time does exist, doesn’t there have to be a definable beginning or end? Otherwise it’s just infinity which to me suggests the absense of time.
I partially read “The Discoverers” by Daniel Boorstin several years ago and he discussed how different societies conceptualized of time and how they kept time. And it has had me wondering ever since. Then I started exploring Zen Buddhism which emphasizes the present moment as the only tangible reality, along with the illusion of the ego, which only furthered my questioning.
EDIT – I am aware that the concept of time is based on the revolution of the Earth and it’s moon. However, that is just how humans conceive of time. That’s not proof of time itself.
EDIT 2 – The explanation of timespace and relativity is the best from an objective point of view. No matter how much I read or watch, it was always a bit hard to grasp but it makes sense in terms of change or entropy. The reality of time being flexible vs the human perception of time being linear and unchangeable gets closer to what I am asking.
EDIT 3 – “Exist” is a tricky word.
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A lot of answer here deal with how we measure time or how quantum or relativity determine what the unit of time is. As you say in your edit, that’s lne thing and but you are asking about time itself.
Idon’t usually answer eli5 questions, specially because English is not my native language, but I’m a fan of the subreddit. I scrolled quite a bit and I saw a surprisingly lack of philosophy based answers to your questions(someone mentioned Aristotle’s definition of time).
It’s a bit hard but I’ll advise you to look up what Kant said about time (and space) [Please if someone is reading this and has a philosophy degree which was studied in English,please correct me and my probably wrong terminology, I puzzled third from some articles]
Kant understands time as something a priori. Is part of our sensibility, constitutes, along with space, the way we are able to understand the world. It’s something we put into the world to be able to categorize it. That’s what a priori means, we have it before we start dealing with the world. When we experience objects we put our time frame into them.
This is important as Kant says we cannot have knowledge of the thing itself (noumena), only of the thing as it appears to us (phenomena). For the thing to appear to us we have to ‘cast a net’, which is the time and space, so we can be able to start dealing with what we have catched. This net metaphor is useful to understand the noumena/phenomena, we can only catch what the net is able to retain, and we can never be sure if every bit of reality has been catched, as we are limited beings.
Sorry for the word salad, thinking about Kant in English is quite hard for me. You can look up some articles if you are interested in the philosophical answer to what is time.
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