How can such a person measure time?

Question

Save for the legendary clock or timepiece, time is a measure of thoughts for an individual. When thoughts cease, time too stops.

How does time exist for a person who is blind, who is deaf, who cant smell, who has lost the sense of touch & taste? Assuming this person was born in such a state, his mind does not receive any inputs via the senses and therefore there wouldnt be any flow of thoughts?

Answer 1

Cogito Ergo Sum. Rene Descartes said it best, and it's probably the ony explanation. If a person has a functioning mind, then thoughts are sequential, and there would be some sense of 'before' and 'after'.

A person completely cut out of sensation doesn't necessarily cease to think. Of course, that thinking won't be in very much the same way as persons with senses, but it still doesn't alter the fact that the brain processes many things sequentially. Perhaps these people might become more aware of bodily functions such as the beating of their own heart. Too, they would still require periods of sleep and being awake.

Other than that, I don't believe that a person with absolutely no sensation of ANYTHING has yet existed, unless they had a severely damaged or deformed brain, and in that case one would wonder if they were even "alive'.

Again though, I'll listen to my old friend Rene.

Answer 2

"He was just a bunch of chemicals in a compex configuration that has broken down. To me this is a very bleak outlook. Really if this was the truth then all he did and said and the wonder that he felt would be for nothing." Your choosing to see it only in terms of bleakness. If he truly thought his life was "all for nothing", then he wouldn't have pursued his line of study, written books, or produced shows sharing his passions with us! Obviously he has left his mark on the world. You and I are proof of that. He inspired you, and others like me, to be excited about our universe, and sparked and/or fostered our desires to learn more about it! It maybe that not all of us will be lucky enough to touch as many lives as Carl Sagan has, and probably will continue to do so in the future. But if we can each inspire someone else in some way, that we aren't forgotten soon after our demise, that's how we truly "live on". Not in some fairytale afterlife.

Answer 3

The definition and existence of time is not dependent upon the subjective experience of any one individual. Time is the quality of spatial necessity whereby sequential relationship allows for the law of causality to become evident. While the sense of time is experienced subjectively by the individual it remains that time is universal in its scope of influence and demonstrably so by the fact that entropy continues to effect the physical body through the breakdown of its physical composition regardless of the existence of thought in the body.

Answer 4

I have a hard time imagining a person as alive without ant senses at all. You have taken away all five, The person would need to be living in a totaly created world.

Answer 5

There are other ways to sense time. The heartbeat for instance. It may not be the same for different people, but it's still consistent within one person.

Answer 6

Time is like a boat we all travel on. If we are in the hull or on deck it doesn't change the direction or speed of the boat. Some fall overboard and are lost. But the boat carries on.

Answer 7

read about Stevie Wonder,
or read a book titled:
A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller

Answer 8

i believe u would make ur own way of keeping time, possibly not understood by others, i think if u have lost something like a sense, u would compensate for it.

Answer 9

We live on Gods time not on mans time. Mans time was invented to organize events here on earth. All divine acts are based on Gods time.

Answer 10

Even with no external sensory inputs, one experiences events: one gets hungry, and must eat; one must eliminate waste.