Practicality and Philosophy

In response to Corey Sloane's blog post on 10/16/2012:

I think that the issue Corey is discussing here is the distinction between philosophical concepts and practical reality.  While in many cases the two categories overlap peacefully, and in some they must overlap, in others they are somewhat separate.  David Hume's rejection of practical implementation of his theory that causality is an illusion is probably the most famous (or infamous) of this last relation, but there are many more mundane examples available.

Consider the concept of a mile.  What exactly is a mile?  It is five thousand, two hundred, and eighty feet.  And what is a foot?  Twelve inches.  What is an inch?  An inch is a totally arbitrary unit of measurement.  There is no reason that humans should measure things by inches rather than by, perhaps, 0.3885ths of inches.  Even more oddly, humans could simply forgo the idea of units of measurement - after all, they are not really necessary in order to survive, and any unit one could come up with would be fairly arbitrary.  Yet in spite of this meaninglessness, people still use the concept of inches (or centimetres, or whatever other unit of measurement, depending on where they live) in order to organise the world in a way which they can understand.  Space may not even exist as we know it, or at all, but without the concept of space humans would probably be totally incapable of understanding reality.

The same may be true of time.  Units of time are certainly arbitrary, and time itself may be nonexistent, but in order to understand what is going on around them, humans must use measures of time.  I do not think that humans could function in day-to-day society without them.  Even if people decided not to dismiss time entirely, but simply dismiss any formal units of time due to their arbitrary nature, they would have no way of organising dentist's appointments, reunions, philosophy classes, or any other events which require more than one person to be somewhere or do something at the same time or at times a certain 'distance' away from each other.  Thus, whether or not time exists, it is a convenient concept without which human society could not function well.