Why De‑Privileging Frames Does Not License a View from Nowhere
Relativity is often invoked as the final word against becoming. If there is no universal present, no privileged frame, then — so the argument goes — all times must be equally real. Perspective dissolves into totality, and the block universe returns, now armed with equations.
This conclusion is not required by relativity. It is a philosophical overreach. What relativity actually demands is not the elimination of perspective, but its discipline.
In this post, we will argue that de‑privileging frames does not abolish perspective. On the contrary, it renders perspective unavoidable while simultaneously forbidding any global or totalising view. Relativity, properly understood, does not license a view from nowhere. It prohibits it.
1. The Slide from Non‑Privilege to Nowhere
The critical slide occurs quickly and often unnoticed.
No frame of reference is privileged.
Therefore, no perspective is privileged.
Therefore, reality itself must be perspective‑independent.
The first step is a physical result. The second is a philosophical clarification. The third is an illicit leap.
Relativity removes privilege, not perspective. To infer a perspective‑free reality from the absence of a preferred frame is to mistake equality for erasure. It replaces many situated viewpoints with a single abstract one — a move that contradicts the very lesson relativity teaches.
The block universe depends on this slide. It treats the relativistic manifold as if it were an observer that sees everything at once. But the manifold is not a perspective. It is a structure — a theory of possible relations — and structures do not see.
2. The Manifold as Surrogate Observer
Once perspective is denied, it must be replaced. In block‑universe reasoning, the replacement is the manifold itself.
The manifold is treated as if it were a completed inventory of events, each equally actual, all laid out together. This move quietly assigns the manifold a role no physical entity could occupy: it becomes a surrogate observer, a God’s‑eye stand‑in that surveys all times without being anywhere in particular.
But this is precisely what relativity forbids. There is no location, no frame, no physical standpoint from which all events are co‑present. To attribute such a standpoint to an abstract structure is not physics; it is metaphysics smuggled in under mathematical cover.
Relativity denies us a privileged frame. It does not grant us a privileged abstraction.
3. Perspective as Condition, Not Limitation
Perspective is often treated as a defect: a limitation imposed by our finitude, something to be overcome in the pursuit of objective truth. Relativity reverses this intuition.
If no frame can claim universal authority, then actuality must always be enacted from somewhere. Perspective is not a veil over reality; it is a condition for reality to appear at all.
This is where the cut becomes indispensable. A cut does not select one perspective from among many equally real ones. It enacts a world in which certain relations, temporal orders, and phenomena are actual. Other possibilities remain structured but uninstantiated.
Perspective here is not subjective. It is ontological. It names the fact that actuality is always local, situated, and incomplete — not because we lack information, but because completion is incoherent.
4. Why Multiplying Perspectives Does Not Yield Totality
A common response to this argument is to concede perspectival locality while insisting that the totality of all perspectives recovers the block universe. If no single frame is privileged, then surely the set of all frames exhausts reality.
This move fails for the same reason the block universe fails more generally: systems do not exhaust their instances.
A collection of perspectives is still a structure — a theory of possible cuts. It is not itself an instantiation. Adding perspectives together does not produce a perspective that sees them all. Totality does not emerge by aggregation.
Relativity gives us a disciplined plurality of possible cuts. It does not give us their completion.
5. Becoming Without Global Time
Once perspective is understood ontologically rather than epistemically, becoming re‑enters without nostalgia for a universal present.
There is no global ‘now’. There is no cosmic clock. But within any instantiated world, temporal articulation is perfectly real. Events stand in relations of before and after. Change occurs. Processes unfold.
Becoming is not something that happens to the universe as a whole. It is what reality is like wherever a cut is made.
The block universe treats the absence of global time as evidence that becoming is illusory. In fact, it shows only that becoming cannot be totalised.
6. Relativity as Ontological Discipline
Read in this way, relativity is not an argument for a static universe. It is a prohibition:
No privileged frame.
No total perspective.
No completed inventory of events.
What remains is not chaos, relativism, or subjectivism, but a disciplined ontology in which actuality is always perspectival and never exhaustive.
The cut names the point at which this discipline is enacted. It is where structure gives way to phenomenon, without pretending to finish the job once and for all.
7. Looking Ahead
If perspective is unavoidable and totality is forbidden, then no system — physical, logical, or semiotic — can ever close over its own actuality. Structure can constrain possibility, but it cannot exhaust it.
In the next post, we will turn to this consequence directly by arguing that phenomena are first‑order: there is no unconstrued reality beneath them waiting to be revealed. This move will complete the transition from physics‑adjacent argument to fully general ontology.
For now, the essential point is this:
Relativity does not eliminate perspective.It forbids its elevation into totality.
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