There are studies showing dogs can tell time by smell. They know when to expect their person (who comes and goes on a regular schedule) by how much their person’s smell has diminished in the home. If someone sneaks in with their person’s sweaty shirt in the middle of the day and waves it around, dog keeps napping when they normally would have known to come to the door before human returns.
Yes, they can tell on a short-ish time scale that there are patterns in smells that grow or fade throughout the day, and can make decisions based on that. Dogs also leave their scent and can tell how recently another dog has been in the area. What a dog cannot do is co-ordinate with another dog to meet at a specific time and place in the future
The point being illustrated is that time as a linguistic construct for the purposes of co-ordinating a complex social system is a broadly human phenomenon and is the thing that separates us from the kind of immediate sensory experience that other animals exist within. The closest parallel is probably bees’ waggle dance or ants’ pheremone trails, or perhaps the capacity of migrating birds to return to the same nesting sites—but much like the sensory trails that dogs follow, these are physical gradients, stored in the environment through the passive actions of other individuals. Measuring and metering time requires sufficiently complex language.
The claim is that measured time is the primordial prison by which humans are trapped within the flattening, reductionising systems of language.
In that respect the aim is not to assert the supremacy of humans, but actually express how we are uniquely severed from nature
There are studies showing dogs can tell time by smell. They know when to expect their person (who comes and goes on a regular schedule) by how much their person’s smell has diminished in the home. If someone sneaks in with their person’s sweaty shirt in the middle of the day and waves it around, dog keeps napping when they normally would have known to come to the door before human returns.
Yes, they can tell on a short-ish time scale that there are patterns in smells that grow or fade throughout the day, and can make decisions based on that. Dogs also leave their scent and can tell how recently another dog has been in the area. What a dog cannot do is co-ordinate with another dog to meet at a specific time and place in the future
I’m not so sure about that but not aware of any studies to back it up
The point being illustrated is that time as a linguistic construct for the purposes of co-ordinating a complex social system is a broadly human phenomenon and is the thing that separates us from the kind of immediate sensory experience that other animals exist within. The closest parallel is probably bees’ waggle dance or ants’ pheremone trails, or perhaps the capacity of migrating birds to return to the same nesting sites—but much like the sensory trails that dogs follow, these are physical gradients, stored in the environment through the passive actions of other individuals. Measuring and metering time requires sufficiently complex language.
The claim is that measured time is the primordial prison by which humans are trapped within the flattening, reductionising systems of language.
In that respect the aim is not to assert the supremacy of humans, but actually express how we are uniquely severed from nature
Really like the article about time management. Well done