Our experience of time passing is heavily influenced by the temporal granuality of our subjective experience-at the upper end, “now” lasts 2-3 seconds; at the lower end, our temporal discrimination goes down to tens of milliseconds for visual and tactile stimuli, and reaches down to microseconds for certain types of auditory stimuli. But, one supposes other species with different neurology would have these durations be shorter or longer, which would make time pass more slowly or faster for them, in subjective terms.
I don't understand this, because it seems like "with a clock" is too obvious an answer, so surely you can't have meant what it sounds like it meant?
So to say seconds "pass" is describing something else. They aren't moving.
One second per second for yourself, but other observers generally disagree.
Or one could use it as an inverse of the things measured against time, so meters/second of speed can be turned into seconds flowing at a rate of length.
Does "miles per gallon" lead to similar questions about gallons passing?
> Could they pass at some rate other than one second per second?
Only, and always, from the point of view of people in different frames of reference.
Sure, it wasn't clear which way you were going with that question, but I recognised that it could have been either.
Practically speaking, that's really what we care about when we talk about the speed of time. If some process takes a certain amount of time to complete, sending it to space and back, without changing anything else about it, might make it complete earlier from our point of reference.
It is actually about seconds per second, and there is an inner and an outer second as you say. There’s nothing wrong with that, because it is always a relative difference between two frames of reference. There are the seconds for our point of view, and there are the seconds for the device we are sending to space and back.
I think you are struggling to understand how to measure the absolute speed of time, but there’s no such thing, it’s always a comparison, it is relative.
I'll acknowledge relativity and different frames of reference, but that isn't really the point.
If a clock is in a frame of faster time, it will tick faster, its ticks will happen before, than an identical clock in a frame of slower time.
That’s how I see time, it is the ordering of physical events, which we can trivially observe.
You keep trying to explain time as if it was a thing of its own, like a water flow, but it is no more than an abstraction to indicate how some things happen before others, and they definitely do, at least in the same frame.
This analogy is insufficient as well of course. For instance, if we have two clocks, we move one onto a faster time frame for a while and then bring it back, it is as if the clock was an ordered stack of physical events, the ordering between the events in either stack is tricky to determine, but you could clearly observe that one stack was more filled than the other.
I am not trying to get into a fight, this is simply a welcome exercise that forces me to crystallize my own understanding, hope it is for you too.