This reminds me of a passage from "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. It's the difference between mechanical time & body time. You can read it here: http://members.iif.hu/visontay/ponticulus/britannicus/einste... (the 24 April 1905 entry).

For something that has no clocks, it sure has a lot of gears like atp synthase https://youtu.be/b_cp8MsnZFA While I appreciate your comment in being fairly correct, I still think there is a lot of value in trying to understand the human body as a molecular machine that runs on top of reality and generates sub environments that have "clocks" to synchronise processes. After all a clock signal doesn't measure the day, it measures discrete intervals.

Cells have an entire range of clocks for tons of purposes. Including a number of "death clocks" tracking a number of things, from passage of time since last cell division (including the famous telomeres), to amount of energy passing through the cell and a lot of more specialized clocks as well. (death clock meaning the cell will self-terminate if the clock runs down)

Just listen to your heartbeat and think again whether your cells don't track the passage of time.

And which exactly protein acts as a counter? What unit it uses? What is representation of the current value if the counter? How it deals with overflows?

Again. There is no counting inside a cell in principle. Only pattern matching of phisical molecular structures and "mechanical" triggers. No counters, no clocks, no notion of a number.

Do not confuse oscillations or rotation with time. Processes do exist. Time does not.

> And which exactly protein acts as a counter?

DNA

> What unit it uses?

That's defined, if rather complex. Essentially it's a basepair sequence.

> What is representation of the current value if the counter?

It's unary.

> How it deals with overflows?

It doesn't.

Care to offer references for your claims that differ completely from, e.g., the article, which is based on decades of research and established science by experts on the matter?

There is nothing much to explain. The principles I am describing here are of classic Eastern philosophy applied to the Evolution process.

The notions of numbers, counting in general and the related concert of time required an observer to be established and formulated. These notions cannot emerge by accident in a purely mechanical perturbations the way life originated. There were no observer, leave alone designer.

This means that life could only use "concrete" phisical structures against which it does exact pattern matching, which is how DNA or RNA translation and protein sintesis works.

Message passing between the cells and triggering of gates and pumps are done by exact pattern matching for the very same reasons - there is no other way in principle. That is why there is no counters or clocks in the nature except human made ones.

> Life has no clocks

Oh yes it has! it's arrow is called entropy and it ticks at the speed of atom decay.

From the life's point of view, so to speak, atoms are immutable. The actual process of decay are below the level of abstraction. Life "knows nothing" about it by definition.