Amazon Author Page : Lance Miller
I am not arguing or denying in any way Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity. Rather, I have a critique and caveat on certain ways of interpreting it's meaning into our lives.
In the referenced video below physicist Sabine Hossenfelder uses a thought experiment to illustrate the relativism of various points of phenomenon in relation to two observers. (embedded video starts exactly at this subsection).
The clever omission here is what I will call biological functionalism(really could be called biological agency). The word functional really gets at the core of this more than agency.
Back to the train scenario. Sure the train and train lights are not experienced at the same time due to light traveling different distances to different viewers in the Universe. My point of disagreement on the rhetoric is the existence of a functionalism in the biological beings watching the train and the lights.
The gaps in (micro) time of the lights are within the thresholds of time in order to pull off a functional relationship to the train, and for the biological observer to potentially gain what they want for pleasure or survival.
A dog watching the arrival of the train knows from previous experiences when the lights do a certain thing and the train slows it is preparing to stop at the station the dog is sitting at. The dog knows it's favorite human leaves for days and returns on this train. It perceives the lights and sounds of the train slowing well enough to react functionally.
Back to the rhetoric in the video. This claim of meaninglessness, or the other claim of entirely different realities depending on the position of the observers, is dubious. This is not how biological beings experience the Universe, it is how atoms experience the Universe. And it is not an illusion the biological beings have conjured up as if in an opiate-driven dream. Biological agents very effectively intervene in the atomic chaos of the Universe -they move things around, they shape things. Regardless of lack of precision through the lens of physics, biological agents effective intervene in the atomic chaos and move the atoms, placing them where the biological entity wanted them, for a duration of time functionally relevant to biology.
We could extend this biological agency up to cultural/social unit agency -with clans, cities, corporations, and nations deciding where to dig up rocks and where to put them after grinding or melting them.
The rhetoric of relativity accuses us of seeing illusions, patterns and meaning where there isn't any. There is something very wrong in this claim. It is to talk as if the atoms and physics of the Universe are the final, wise, non-illusion perception of reality. The rhetoric suspiciously leaves out biological functionalism, and by extension cultural technological functionalism.
The illusion, the lie, is actually in the rhetoric.
...and there is a logical link between this rhetoric of illusion and meaninglessness as a grounding orientation in academic promotion of post-modernism to fresh waves of young adults in college.
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