>>11255151Unfortunately, I think if you try and ask what these base quantities are, you'll come up blank. Our brains sadly did not evolve to contemplate what things are, but what brains DO succeed in doing in observing properties, and engaging in comparison. We can compare two events happening at different times, we can compare two times to say that one was longer than the other, we can observe a phenomenon and look to our clocks to see that the clock took 3 seconds to carry out its process, so therefore the event lasted 3 seconds.
If you find this answer unsatisfying, try to define other less mysterious quantities, like length or area. You will struggle. All we can do with length, area and time is to make comparisons: this stick is 60cm pong because it has equivalent length to the 60cm mark on my ruler.
