Question: I'm looking to find some resources to read about the following:  

When we talk about a general concept (the word pencil in "a pencil is made of wood"), we actually have a mental image of a **particular** object in our mind (a particular pencil with a particular color in the example).

I'm looking to read about this and similar issues. I don't even know what topic to look into. I've looked a bit on Frege's work but I didn't find what I was looking for. I'd appreciate suggestions.

Answer: 
Ernst Mach and Julian Barbour suggest that *time is our perception of change*, and perhaps that's one of the best definitions of time I've found. The only physical fact lying under such definition is *change*, which we can perceive subjectively.

Before answering your question, a mental experiment. Imagine you are a prisoner in a jail cell where you cannot perceive change, at all. No prisoners near, no windows, no signals, noises, visits, nothing. Evidently, in such circumstance you will quickly start losing the sense of time. We need change perception to be aware of time.

In such experiment, you have anyhow some change perception. You can feel your heart beating, your respiration has a rhythm, your body functions follow a period. Using such information, you have a minimal perception of change that allows you to get a minimal notion of time. In ultimate instance, you can count lambs. 

But in your experiment, there are only two events (or one). That is equivalent to say that there's no perception of body functions, of respiration, of nothing. Not even labs counting. Cerebral death. The two events can be considered to waking up twice, for small instants, in the middle of the night, not knowing which is which.

Under such light, your question have two possible answers: 

* "nothing happens", and "time still pass". That is equivalent to say that even if nobody hears it, there was a noise.
* "nothing happens", and time does not pass. That is equivalent to say that if nobody hears it, there was **no** noise.

So, from this perspective, your question would be highly biased by preconceived ideas about perception. If the existence of the time entity is subjectively dependent, the idea of modifying the perceptive conditions would only have a rhetoric impact, since we cannot modify our perception to such extreme.
The interval of a second is currently defined as exactly 9 192 631 770 cycles of a Caesium atomic clock. Furthermore the definition has changed several times.

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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second>
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From this we see that: 1. The interval of a second is completely arbitrarily chosen. 2. Scientists take great care to construct high precision *relative* time scales. This brings us to how Science sees the *time dimension*: 

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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime>
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Relativity theory tells us that time is integral to the fabric of "Reality". That is, any measurements an *Observer* makes must be done in *four dimensions*. 
Now we can say that: 1. Scientifically speaking a time interval can only be said to be real when observed, with an appropriate *external* time scale. But, 2. An Observer independant Spacetime interval underlies Special relativity.

From 1. we would say that indeed there are no time elapsed between A and B. However from 2. there is a mathematical abstraction that could correlate to and independent spacetime.

But wait there is more: 

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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality>  
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> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement>
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Taking Quantum and Relativity together we also find, 1. not only an isolated system for A and B, but the whole universe must be without events in order to have a truly Timeless interval. However it is unclear whether the previous sentence is *even valid* because of a) the large areas of discord between Quantum and Relativity theories and b) the different interpretations of Relativity, and especially Quantum, theory.

**Philosophic implications**

There are no consensus among philosophers-of-science about the true nature of time. But from a Physics standpoint Time does not exist independently of Space, and some would add Observers.