Many known physical phenomena are dependent on time, and are in fact a function of time.
However if I think of reality as something that exists independently of perception by an observer, then it starts to seem like time is a construct of our mind, which is in place so that reality can be processed and interpreted by our limited brains, a chunk at a time.
There is a quote, not sure who said it first, "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once." That sounds a lot like the way our brains deal with making sense of events, rather than an inherent property of reality.
My question is: has time been proven to exist outside of the perception of a living observer? What's there to it more than there is to a "normal" sense out of the ones we have (i.e. how is the passing of a second any more real than a color, which is just a specific wavelength of light, and the experience of a color itself is just a construct of our mind dependent on our sense of sight)?