@crazyivan
From St. Augustine’s Confessions:
“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.”
I realize the clocks in this question just metonymize human consciousness; of course time would still exist and be percevied in consciousness even without their existence, just as the concept of length would exist without rulers. In a sense both length and time are measurements (of dimensions) and the units we apply to them meta-measurements.
So @Nullo and @wundayatta are correct re the measurement of time, although I would amend the former’s ‘sequence’ to ‘duration’...
“Instead, let us imagine an infinitely small piece of elastic, contracted, if that were possible, to a mathematical point. Let us draw it out gradually in such a way as to bring out of the point a line which will grow progressively longer. Let us fix our attention not on the line as line, but on the action which traces it. Let us consider that this action, in spite of its duration, is indivisible if one supposes that it goes on without stopping; that, if we intercalate a stop in it, we make two actions of it instead of one and that each of these actions will then be the indivisible of which we speak; that it is not the moving act itself which is never indivisible, but the motionless line it lays down beneath it like a track in space. Let us take our mind off the space subtending the movement and concentrate solely on the movement itself, on the act of tension or extension, in short, on pure mobility. This time we shall have a more exact image of our development in duration.”
(Henri Bergson)