Is time immanent in the world - reducible, perhaps, to the ticking of an atomic clock - or transcendent, somehow beyond the physical universe? (One of my old Canterbury lecturers gave a great talk on this a couple of years back.) We seem pressed towards a kind of middle ground. No mere clock can be the ultimate standard of time, for a clock may slow down, and that does not mean that the rest of the universe has speed up! No, we take them to be measuring something beyond themselves. The same will be true of any local standard (e.g. the movement of the sun).
Markosian (1993) suggests:
[The change in the sun's position] is also meant to be a stand-in for a more important change, namely, the pure passage of time. Indeed, it seems that our assumption that the sun's position changes at a constant rate amounts to the assumption that the sun's position changes at the rate of fifteen degrees per hour, i.e., that every time the sun moves fifteen degrees across the sky, one hour of pure time passes. So it at least appears that what we are after in trying to determine the rates of various physical processes, such as Bikila's running of the marathon, are the rates at which those processes occur in comparison to the rate of the pure passage of time. (pp.840-1)
I hope we can come up with a better account of this appearance, since "the rate of the pure passage of time" is
gibberish. But why should we interpret "fifteen degrees per hour" as relating two changes (the sun through space vs. the present through time)? It seems on the face of it to just be reporting a single change, i.e., that the sun moves fifteen degrees across the sky in the space of one hour. The
hour doesn't have to move. Just the sun.
Perhaps the worry is that if time doesn't pass, then the standard of an 'hour' must be defined in terms of immanent physical changes (like the sun's movement, or a clock's ticking). But all measurement is like this. A clock is to time as a ruler is to space. Nobody takes this to mean that we need an objective 'here', extending over space at a rate of one meter per meter, to tell us how long a meter
really is in case all our rulers suddenly shrink. Yet Markosian writes (p.841):
suppose that the pure passage of time thesis is false... if it should turn out one day that the motion of the sun in the sky appears to speed up drastically relative to other changes, then we should say, not that the motion of the sun has sped up drastically relative to the pure passage of time, while every other change has maintained its rate, but, rather, simply that the sun's motion has sped up relative to the other normal change.
Why can't we say that the sun has sped up drastically, not relative to any
other rate, but just
simpliciter? It is moving a greater distance in space for the same interval of time. Simple.
It seems like the real issue here is substantival vs. relational conceptions of space-time. If space-time is like a container, an objective
thing in its own right, then universal shrinkage - or slowing - of its contents might be a coherent possibility (even if we couldn't recognize such an event from the inside). If they're merely relational, on the other hand, and so fundamentally about relative proportions, then the idea of all distances or durations universally increasing may make no sense, since to double each component is to leave the ratio the same. (Note that while this is a curious issue in its own right, it's nothing to do with the passage of time.)
In any case, if immanent relations are all that we have access to, we may wonder whether substantive, transcendent space-time could really matter. So it is worth seeking a plausible immanentist theory. We noted at the start that no local standard would do. But perhaps a global generalization would serve better. Plausibly, we seek a frame of reference that yields the greatest amount of stability in our general region. Relative to my heartbeat, the world is in a crazy flux. But my clock, and the sun's movement, and a whole cluster of other natural processes, can be interpreted as each holding a constant rate relative to each other. So we take this general cluster as our standard of time. Any one component may become out of sync with the rest, in which case we will judge it to have changed its pace. The stability of the cluster thus transcends each of its parts (considered individually), whilst remaining wholly immanent. That strikes me as providing as good a basis for measurement as one could hope for.
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and thought, "Exactly, that's what I meant when I said that 
