Measuring Non-Linear Time?

[druid91]

So. Right now we judge somethings age by how many years it has survived. But how do you judge somethings age if it does not follow linear time?

If something exists in the Year 1999, 2003, and 2014. At what point is it one year old, two years old, or three years old? What if it remembers all but the present iteration of existence save the current?

[Lvl 2 Expert]

What if it remembers all but the present iteration of existence save the current?

Then either it does not have an age, or its age in all time points is the total of the amount of time it has existed, both in the past and the future. It seems a reasonable approximation. At all these time points it draws on X years of experience, so its age is always X.

It gets extra tricky if time has been/will be/will have been experienced at different paces, at a standstill or backwards, if from one moment to the next they have a futuristic device because between those moments they did the equivalent of hundreds of years of research and construction to make the advice. Yet they didn't/don't experience it as hundreds of years passing, because they live in every moment at the same "time", they just live really fast in that one moment. At that point you should probably just ask them how old they are, I'm not sure out language is even equipped to express something like that.

[Yora]

The question is which one is more useful information "time passed since its start until now" or "amount of time it was exposed to interactions and underwent internal developments". And I have to say for the vast majority of cases the only use of the former is to calculate the later.

Also, you can simply say "began on 24th august 1986" if this is what you want to know. Saying "it started 41 years and 16 days before now" is needlessly convoluted.

When we say "he's 21 years old", we don't want to tell someone when this person was born. We do it to give a rough expectation of his mental development and visual appearance.

There really is no point in saying "this time traveler is minus 57 years old". The only thing we might be interested in knowing is "he has the devlopment of a 21 year old" or "he will be born in 2038".