SUO: Re: One Stone Makes a Beach
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JA = Jon Awbrey
TD = Ted Dace
JA: This way to the egress >>>--->>>
JA: For information on metaphysics, read books by metaphysicians.
TD: Naturally.
JA: For information on space, time, spacetime, physical objects,
physical processes, and so on, read books by mathematicians
and physicicts.
TD: "Spacetime," yes. "Space" and "time," no.
Taken separately these are not physical concepts.
TD: Einstein did us all a big favor by positing physics on strictly relativistic
terms. Even the so-called "absolute" of acceleration (which is correlated
with gravity under General Relativity) exists only in relation to the object
being accelerated. As to the "absolute" speed of light in Special Relativity,
this applies only to a perfect vacuum, and, of course, no such thing exists.
While physics works a lot better when we don't try to define anything as
intrinsically real, in the absence of a thing that exists in-and-of itself,
science reduces to nihilism, a castle in the sky. It's impossible to nail
down a definitive ontology because ultimately it's all up in the air.
TD: Hence the need for a metaphysical anchor. RealTime serves as a natural ground
for all subsequent ontological categories. Topology and set theory, etc., add
nothing to our direct intuition of time itself. The point is not to add further
to our already unwieldy calculations but to provide an overall framework in which
to make sense of them.
Ted,
I've read my Bergson, Bachelard, Borges, and Barth, and then moved on to the C's.
We can do our personal phenomenologies till we're blue in the face, and it can be
healthy and rewarding mental exercise, in moderation. Taken to excess, we become
like windowless or netscapeless monads, but without the pre-established harmony.
But when two people, two hundred, or two billion try to relate their personal
phenomenologies to a reality that they have independently abduced might be
the common cause withal, then they will find themselves faced with a task
that is strikingly similar, if not uncannily isomorphic to the one that
physicists began to be aware of from the time of what my old physics
book called Galilean relativity, that is, comparing the impressions
that register on one monad's retinas with those that impress on
another's cerebral gyres. In addressing the physical version
of this gradually emerging problematic, Einstein did not
work in a cultural vacuum, but drew on a philosophical
turn that was already in motion, relatively speaking,
going back to Riemann, and even to Kant. So that
is the fund of ideas that I think it makes sense
to draw on for guidance in this business of
finding common senses of what is in common.
Jon Awbrey
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