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.
Time, as we know it is a method of tracking events, the "time" we know is something that is defined by man, but something defined by man is not always created by them, "time" will always flow, without time, we would not be able to see, hear, think, thus be.

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> That is, if everything in the universe suddenly stopped, would there really be any time at all? 
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even if "everything stopped" time would not, time exists outside our brains and thoughts, quantum particles and such are constantly moving, no matter where.

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> Let's say we were creatures floating around in a space where literally NOTHING happens that we can clearly say came after something else. 
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There is never a situation where "nothing happens", there are situations where you may think "nothing is happening" but constantly something is happening, particles are always moving, they never stop, even without there being someone to "define" time, time will exist. 

Time is not something that is defined by events. time is what defines the events, for something to happen time must pass.

What you are thinking here is similar to Schrödinger's cat theorem, which basically implies 

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> Does something exist if no one observes it? 
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In the theory, the cat that is put into a poison gas box, and is at the same time alive and dead because it is not observed, but the same cannot be applied to time, time is not something you can "observe" but it still moves

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> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger%27s\_cat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat)
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