The Voice of Allan Zade
There appears to be a dissection between duration as a physical property of any process and the abstract concept of Time as an innate idea.
An Innate idea in philosophy, an idea allegedly inborn in the human mind, as contrasted with those received or compiled from experience. The doctrine that at least certain ideas (e.g., those of God, infinity, substance) must be innate, because no satisfactory empirical origin of them could be conceived, flourished in the 17th century and found in René Descartes its most prominent exponent. The theory took many forms: some held that a newborn child has an explicit awareness of such ideas; others, more commonly, maintained that innate ideas have some implicit form, either as a tendency or as a dormant capacity for their formulation, which in either case would require favourable experiential conditions for their development.
John Locke's vigorous criticism later in the century was directed against innate principles (supposed axioms, both theoretical and practical, implanted in the mind by nature) and the innate ideas claimed as the terms of the principles. But Locke's empiricism had difficulty with certain key concepts, such as substance, “which we neither have nor can have by sensation or reflection,” and cause, about which he largely anticipated David Hume's difficulties in the 18th century. Locke seems to have shared some of the assumptions of his opponents (e.g., that if an idea is innate it cannot be wrong) and to have sensed that the issue is one of logic (of the status of a priori propositions) and not of genetic psychology. Completing this distinction, the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant replaced the doctrine of innate ideas with questions about a priori concepts, which he characterized in terms not of their origin but of their necessity as conditions of human experience of an objective world. In the 20th century, Noam Chomsky argued the necessity for postulating innate ideas to explain the possibility of language.
- innate idea. (2008). Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Deluxe Edition. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
Summarizing the above quotation, we have some characteristics of any innate idea. It is ever "allegedly inborn in the human mind," "contrasted from experience," "has not any "satisfactory empirical origin," has a "dormant capacity for its formulation," and "cannot be wrong."
The category of "Time" includes all those aspects. That idea meets all the requirements of innate ideas because even modern sources do not have a suitable definition of Time. For example,
Time appears to be more puzzling than space because it seems to flow or pass or else people seem to advance through it. But the passage or advance seems to be unintelligible. The question of how many seconds per second time flows (or one advances through it) is obviously an absurd one, for it suggests that the flow or advance comprises a rate of change with respect to something else—to a sort of hypertime. But if this hypertime itself flows, then a hyper-hypertime is required, and so on, ad infinitum. Again, if the world is thought of as spread out in space–time, it might be asked whether human consciousness advances up a timelike direction of this world and, if so, how fast; whether future events pop into existence as the “now” reaches them or are there all along; and how such changes in space–time can be represented, since time is already within the picture.
- time. (2008). Encyclopedia Britannica 2008 Deluxe Edition. Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica.
Such a point of view produces delusions about the reality of time. Ancient people had their way of hiding the delusion of innate ideas and making them compatible with the physical world. They created depictions of innate ideas. The best example of that way was a depiction of Chronos (the ancient god of Time), who "was usually portrayed through an old, wise man with a long, grey beard" (see above). As a result, any concern about the nature of Time had the most straightforward solution with the answer: "Look! This is Chronos. He rules the Time, and he is Time itself!"
Humankind has depicted the innate idea of "Time" similarly until today. The same question is generally answered today the same way: "Look at the Clock. It shows Time!" Hence, they usually mistake the changing indications of a clock for the passage of time itself. Moreover, Time, as an innate idea, cannot be wrong (see above). That point of view caused the implementation of Time in any area of knowledge and science, even in physics, as a fundamental property of the Universe.