Saturday, March 11, 2017

TOW #22 - Does Time Really Exist?


We're living through a profound shift in worldview, from the belief that time and space are entities in the universe to one in which they belong to the living.”
Biocentrism Robert Lanza, M.D. argues in an article that time is more of a social-constructed idea than a reality. He states that he believes that education and experience has shape time. He describes clocks and watches as "comparisons of events", but says that time is conceptually not this.
I agree with Lanza's argument. I think that our sleep and school and work schedules shape how we fill time, but time is not something that is measurable. For example, I think that, whoever came up with the idea that we sleep at night and work during the daylight did this because they were tired, not because it was their definite "bedtime".
Working on "week days" (which is a social construct in itself) and having off on weekends is another society construct. Our bodies and minds are used to the routine of getting up at a certain time and going to sleep at a certain time, but this does night necessarily mean that this can't change. People who often feel in a "time crunch" are actually just having problems following this social construct. In reality, everyone has the same amount of "time" during the day, just some are better at managing this unit of measurement than others.

Thinking time is a social construct may be pessimistic sounding thinking. A lot of people feel this way because questioning things that are yet to have been discovered is out of people's comfort zone. But, like Socrates preached with his method, you can’t discover things if no one ever questions anything. A society that does not tweak and refined their ways is an unproductive, undeveloped one.

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