For the human concept of time to not exist, change would not be allowed to happen. Our symbolic representations of the passage of time are integral to our dealings and interactions with an ever changing natural world.
Objects are in one place and humans often take them to other places. A red apple exists. A red apple is gone. Without the concept of time, there could be no discussion about when the apple existed and when it went missing. Very little could be done to solve the mystery of the missing apple without the concepts of “before”, “now”, “then”, “later”, “sooner”, “future”, “after” and “when”.
Change happens to all things, even those things that seem to be permanent for eternity. Without the concept of time, there would be no way to quantify, predict or understand the ways in which nature changes and affects us.
The apple was fresh and edible. The apple would probably make us sick if we ate it. When and how quickly did the apple change from one state to the other? What could we do to predict the length of time during which an apple is edible? What can we do to the apple to delay the change that makes our food harmful?
Without the concept of change over time, very little could be done to understand how our food or water changes from something that we need into something that can poison us.
All things have some form of movement. We had to walk in order to get to the apple trees. Now the apple is in our home. Without the concept of time, we would have no way to gauge distance and effort that it would take to get food and water or to roam from one place to the next.
Humans do things that have results. There was land. Now there is a structure with a table that has an apple on it. Without the concept of time, humans might always be either building or walking for apples. The concept of time allows us to manage time and to allocate it to different goals.
Apples come and go. There are apples on trees, then there are no apples on the trees. The trees change in other ways. Without the concept of time, there would be no way to make deductions, inferences and predictions that apples come at a certain time of the year and that they ripen and then rot at certain times.
Time is a human construct that allows virtually all endeavors in life to have meaning, to allocate importance of one action over another, to make predictions and forecasts, to make inferences and deductions, and to do a host of other functions that are essential to living in a natural or even artificial world.
Without humans, perheps the concepts of time would not exist, but change and movement in all of their forms and varieties would still exist. Perhaps there would be some other way for living and thinking things to quantify that change or movement and to use the quantification and the symbolic representations in order to improve the odds of survival.
