Time is just a concept, and cannot exist by itself.

"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know." -- St. Augustine, Confessiones First, let me thank Kleptin for posting this debate. You are one of the better debaters on this site in my estimation, and I look forward to a challenging, intellectually stimulating debate on the topic. I'll try to live up to the standard you set for me in your first paragraph. Second, my apologies for not posting sooner, but I was a little swamped. Sorry it took so much... time:) I will be arguing the Con position fully and directly; namely, that 1)time is not just a concept and 2)that time not only can, but indeed must, exist independently of human (or other) perception. "...[T]he concept of time is simply a necessary measure developed to describe the phenomenon of change." -Time, like space, is a necessary and a priori condition of existence. In the above quote, even you say that time is a necessary measure. Necessary = "absolutely essential; indispensable" (The American Heritage Dictionary, Third Ed.) So your words end up meaning that time, even if it were just a concept that we used to describe change, must exist. I will say that we do measure time in terms of change, and that our conceived increments of measurement (hours, minutes, etc) are rather arbitrary, but that time still does exist externally of us. I won't say that what is called "time" isn't a somewhat fuzzy area of our understanding, though. "The concept of change, I believe, is just a result of human thinking. Upon forming beliefs on how things are, what they are, what they do, and what they should do, we define change. Thus, we see time as a necessary 4th dimension and do not question its existence." -All concepts are the result of human thinking. We conceptualize the three spatial dimensions and give them the name "space" because we perceive them directly at all times; why and how is the concept of time any different? It has different properties than the spatial dimensions to be certain, but this does not invalidate the idea of time as a dimension in any way. Space and time complement each other, one could say. I do understand what you meant by "we see time," but for the sake of being technical, and for the purpose of understanding my position, I would say that we "see" the spatial dimensions and that we more or less sense the temporal dimension internally. Could you expand on the second sentence in that paragraph, please? "In that case, the concept of time, like the concept of change, would be an arbitrary, artificial concept that cannot exist without human bias." -There is human bias in everything we do because all experience is subjective. However, there would continue to be both time and change even if humans, or any other form of being, did not exist to sense it and make their arbitrary divisions and measurements. It might be likened to the old (and perhaps trite) philosophical question, "Does a tree make a noise if it falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it?" Similarly, humans weren't always around to perceive time and change, but things changed nonetheless, and the clock was running, so to speak. I would also like to add that the passing of time is "felt" by all life, not humans exclusively. It is only homo sapiens that gave the process its name, after all of the evolutionary changes that had to take place for us to have the capacities (especially language) to do so. Change is not an illusion, and it takes time to change, therefore time exists. If I mistook your meaning on any of the above points, please let me know. To be continued... Back to you, Kleptin.