Concept of time

[desertrat]

Would having a concept of time be important to an advanced civilisation or could one evolve without being bothered by it?

[woofgang]

do you mean like meeting at 3pm, or things happening sequentially. I don't see how you can do without the first once you have progressed beyond every body living together and doing things immediately. Once you start to plan ahead, and need to co-operate, the concept of "okay then we'll meet up at sunrise" is bound to creep in. Like wise you have to kill the buffalo before you can cook it (sequential events) and I'll bet Mrs Ugg soon learned that if you leave your fricassee of buffalo on the fire for too long, or not long enough Mr Ugg gets cranky

[kags]

We would not have survived to make up the advanced society we (supposedly) have today without our distant ancestors having a rudimentary concept of time - they would have otherwise have starved. Even in the hunter gatherer days they must have used the passage of the seasons to make decisions about whether to migrate north, south, to find water, food, shelter etc. Although itdidn't involve the same exact measurement of time we have now, it was more essential for survival to be aware of time. And of course, as agriculture grew up, reliance on the seasons was equally essential. I also do not think a society could evolve without a sense of history or planning for the future.

[desertrat]

Its a tricky one. Wouldn't some of these examples be more like cause and effect rather than an proper concept of time. For example I put the food in the fire and it went black and tasted pretty nasty. When it went brown it was good. Likewise with the hunter gatherer. "Why are we hanging about here it's getting colder and all the food went that way"?

[kags]

True there will have been some cause and effect initially, but hanging around for the food to run out before setting off on a migration would have meant lean times - I reckon they would have learnt to judge the passing of the seasons so they could set off in good time. Couldn't you regard much of what we do in modern society as cause and effect? eg, if I don't get back to my car in an hour I will get a parking ticket, or if I don't get out of bed now I will miss my train. The lines are very blurred. One of the main factors of an advanced society is people learning to live together and respect each other, and for that we need laws - people need to understand time to follow laws don't you think? In an advanced society law breaking is punished by sentences measured in time - the alternatives, capital and corporal punishment are seen as the domain of the less advanced societies (including some of the US States of course but that's a whole other topic!). I can see there are flaws in that arguement too - the reason I personally don't go and murder someone is nothing to do with the punishment,it's to so with the type of person I am, but broadly if there were no punishments then we could not live in an advanced society. This is deep stuff for a Friday morning,I should be working but this is distracting me nicely!

[kags]

ps I have an autistic child who struggles with time as a concept, whereas my other, non-autistic, child has learnt it along with all the other things we take for granted. I am constantly reminded how difficult it is to explain things without the benefit of time as a yardstick, and have had to learn to use sequentiality (I think that's the right word) and cause and effect to explain things. It has made me realise how important time is to us non-autistic people, whilst it has also made me realise that we perhaps become ruled by it too much.

[Elementor]

I'm not going to go into a long winded debate or anything because that's not my thing, but I do want to say that I don't think people on Earth could have developed without at least someone having a good concept of time since many of the physical equations which describe our universe include time, or are described as a certain event happening over one second for example.

[desertrat]

I found that interesting about your autistic son having difficulty with the concept of time. Considering that the majority of autistic children are at least as intelligent as the average "normal" child and then whether or not had humans had a similar condition from the beginning. Would humans ever have developed a concept of time? Would society have become as advanced as it is today? I found an interesting link about the concept of time whilst searching for autism along with concept of time (not that I can see where it mentions autism) and found that the article largely starts where this thread has begun - When did time become important to humans.

[woofgang]

back to the fricassee of buffalo...yup, first of all you might do the black brown thing but people would have wanted to go do something else while the buff was baking, so If I run to the nearest berry bushes when i get back, the food won't be done, If I go to the well as well, it will just about be ready but if I go to the well and the berry bushes and the root patch, then the meat will be black when i get back

[desertrat]

Doh! Meant to post the link! http://www.informationheadquarters.com/Philosophy/
Intellectual_history.shtml

[kags]

Autism affects everybody differently but i think society would not have evolved as it has if everyone were autistic, for many reasons, but lacking a concept of time would certainly be one of them! My daughter has no sense of urgency - this can only come if you understand time, and she most certainly would not make any plans or provision for the future if left to her own devices. She does remember the past, but her memories are packed in little boxes that do not impact on each other - does that make sense? She doesn't regret anything because she doesn't seem to see a progression in events. That would be how living with no concept of time would be, we would have no regrets or worries for the future, but nothing would ever get done and we would starve!!

[Ewood27]

Next time you see someone look at their watch, ask them the time. They will have to look again. The question they asked the watch before was not "What time is it?" but "Am I late?", "How much parking time is left?" or something similar.

[cardinal]

desertrat - did you expect these sort of answers to your question?

[cardinal]

I am more than happy to say that it is this sort of question that makes Answerbank the pre-eminent site on the internet for questions and answers.

[desertrat]

cardinal - Yes. The answers started pretty much how I anticipated. However, I thought more would have been discussed regarding the cut off point between a "hazy" concept of time ie seasons to a concept of defined time intervals which we use today in mathematics as an example. Could any advanced civilisation evolve if they did not get past the "hazy" concept for example? I suppose it could be argued how you would define an advanced civilisation in the first place.