I think you're stoned, my friend. Can I have some of what you're having?

I think what you think could be possible and is somewhat true. I mean, we can never have another "Friday, October 20th, 2006" ever again, now can we? But having days, nights, weeks, months, years, helps keep track of what the time is. It would be hard to plan and keep track of events n stuff if we didn't have them.

Things like days, nights, weeks, hours are just the human way that's developed for measuring one great big long existence. The human race decided to measure hours and minutes so we know how long to successfully cook something. How long do we irrigate so that our crops are hydrated without being flooded? How long do we let a woman struggle in labor before a C-section may be required to save her life and the baby's? To pass this knowledge along to the next generation, we had to be able to describe it. That's all these words are - "days, nights, weeks"- a way to express and describe lengths of time. "After the next full moon it will be time to plant our crops so we need to start preparing the land*, for example. And in the modern day it relates to contracts -- how will we know if we've worked the right amount of time for the agreed compensation? How will I know when my plane leaves? It's a way to measure so we have established standards. We need to know what is necessary for our survival - if you don't cook the pork long enough you can become diseased. When we know winter is coming we need to lay in supplies and gather plenty of firewood. When is the best time of year to catch salmon? All of these survival tools involve measurement of time. Man devised these measurements based on natural phenomena, after observing the movement of the moon, planets and stars, noting the lengths of shadows, seeing how cold and heat were more sugnificant at different times. We knew that we could generally work more effectively during daylight. So it's true we started without any measurments of time, but we found that developing and using them could extend our survival and add quality to our great big long existence. Man found reasons to know "when". EDIT: SquealingPig, you didn't ask for the history of measuring time in your original question, just in your comment. Your original question was more esoteric than practical and that's how I answered it. Every ancient civilization had methods of measuring time, many based initially on cycles of the moon and then making divisions of that. There is even evidence of keeping track of time during the Ice Age by carving notches on bones. The Sumerians, 5000 years ago, had their days portioned into 12 hours, but their hours were two of our current hours. Egyptians based their calendar on the rising of Sirius (the Dog Star), every 365 days, and that's when the Nile flooded every year. It's a pretty broad subject, and here is a great link with a lot of info: http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/ancient.html.

Of course we are. Measures of time are only there for convenience.

When you say that you believe there is no such thing as days, nights, and weeks, you're partly right -- these units of measure are defined by the mind: we "chop time up" into little bits for useful purposes. They have no absolute existence separate from our definition of them. But its equally true that we're not "living one long existence" if you apply that logic consistently, because "long" and "existence" are also relative terms: "long" has no meaning separate from "short", and "existence" has no meaning separate from "non-existence". All of these terms, and even our ability to conceive of such distinctions, are completely a function of the way our minds work. Everything you can single out is just a distinction in thought based on dualistic discrimination. Not a bad way to get things done, though... :-) (Tagging on to LynfromNM): A second is a second by definition. The time basis is determined by agreement, I think the current units of time measure are all based on the decay of radioactive elements (which is a natural phenomenon with very stable period).