Why De‑Privileging Frames Does Not License a View from Nowhere
Relativity is often invoked in support of a block‑universe picture: a four‑dimensional spacetime in which past, present, and future are equally real, laid out as a completed whole. The argument usually runs as follows: if there is no privileged frame of reference, then no privileged now exists; if no privileged now exists, then all events must exist together; therefore, reality is a single, completed totality.
This argument sounds sophisticated. It is not.
It trades on a subtle but decisive confusion: the move from de‑privileging perspectives to abolishing perspective altogether. Relativity does the former. Totality requires the latter.
This post makes the cut explicit.
1. What Relativity Actually Removes
Relativity removes privilege, not situatedness.
No inertial frame is metaphysically special. No coordinate system enjoys divine endorsement. No observer occupies a uniquely correct standpoint.
But none of this implies that there exists a perspective‑free description in which all events are simultaneously present. Quite the opposite.
Relativity tells us that:
descriptions are always frame‑relative
simultaneity is not absolute
transformations relate perspectives without collapsing them
The lesson is not that perspective disappears, but that many perspectives coexist without hierarchy.
2. The Illicit Slide to Totality
Block‑universe reasoning typically inserts an extra step:
Since no frame is privileged, we may adopt a frame that includes them all.
This step is nowhere licensed by relativity.
A frame is, by definition, a perspective with determinate relations. There is no super‑frame that contains all frames without remainder. To posit one is to reintroduce precisely the God’s‑eye view that relativity forbids.
De‑privileging does not generalise to omniscience.
Relativity dismantles hierarchy; it does not construct totality.
3. Simultaneity Is Not the Issue
Much of the confusion arises from fixation on simultaneity.
It is true that different frames disagree about what is simultaneous with what. But disagreement does not imply that all events are equally present in some higher register. It implies only that presence is frame‑bound.
Presence is not abolished; it is localised.
To conclude that all events are equally real because no absolute simultaneity exists is to mistake the loss of a universal clock for the gain of a universal container.
Relativity gives us neither.
4. Presence Without Totality
Once we refuse the slide to totality, a different ontological picture emerges.
Events are fully present in their instantiation. They do not need to be gathered into a global whole in order to be real. Reality is not waiting to be assembled.
This aligns with a more general ontological discipline developed elsewhere on this blog:
instantiation is perspectival, not temporal
systems constrain what may occur without inventorying actuality
presence does not require global inclusion
Relativity fits comfortably within this picture — provided we do not ask it to do metaphysical work it was never designed to perform.
5. Why the Block Universe Persists
If relativity does not require totality, why does block‑universe thinking remain so attractive?
Two reasons recur:
Mathematical representation — spacetime diagrams invite us to mistake representational convenience for ontological commitment.
Metaphysical nostalgia — the lingering desire for a single, complete picture in which nothing is left undecided.
Neither reason is physical. Both are philosophical.
The block universe is not a consequence of relativity. It is a metaphysical consolation prize offered in exchange for the loss of absolute time.
6. Relativity as Ontological Discipline
Read properly, relativity imposes a discipline remarkably close to the one developed in the previous posts:
no privileged perspective
no global simultaneity
no view from nowhere
But also:
no completed totality
no inventory of all events
no finished universe
Relativity teaches us how to relate perspectives without abolishing them. Totality does the opposite.
7. What Follows
Once relativity is understood as a refusal of totality rather than an endorsement of it, the ambition of a “theory of everything” must again be rearticulated.
What remains possible is not a God’s‑eye description, but a disciplined framework of constraints governing all physically possible instantiations — always perspectival, never complete.
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