Computers and humans have radically different ways to reckon time. While a computer can tell you how long sometime took it, the computer is constantly switching between tasks, so this number has to be converted to wall clock time, or rather how much time elapsed in the real world while it was working on the job.
I guess I’m a dualist, because I think there’s something special about sentience. I think of humans (and possibly others creatures) are essentially divine but finite beings, whereas to me computers are mere objects. We divine beings can spend some of our finite time on earth to make a program run faster, but at some point it makes more sense to simply wait, and do something else while the program is running. It is hard to draw an equivalence between the opportunity cost for a divine being vs. an object. Learning when to just wait is one of the most important skills a developer can acquire.