![]() The actual event occurred within your imagination. Later on you may create new events by accessing your memory to recall that story. Then you plotted that event in your memory. The actual event was your reading the news and learning about the explosion. This is how you would plot the event in space-time.īut if you define events this way, you aren’t paying attention to what really happened. Its time is some particular time of day yesterday. Its place is the other city where the explosion occurred. You might be inclined to say that the event was the explosion that happened the previous day. You read about it in the news the next day. You are in fact a necessary component of every event that occurs. You cannot have an event which is completely outside of you. The point here is that all events are both self-referential and subjective. “outside of me”), and therefore you’re still being subjective. ![]() But if you remove the abstraction layer, you can see that you actually plotted events relative to yourself.Įven if you try to define an event that exists outside yourself, you’re still being self-referential (i.e. When you talk about objective events, what you’ve actually done is defined a space-time coordinate system relative to yourself, and then you placed events within that coordinate system. You see… objectivity is simply an extra layer of abstraction on top of subjectivity. Objectivity is something you had to learn about through your subjective senses. We can’t escape the fact that all of space-time comes to us through our perceptions, including the memories we rely upon when we’re trying to be objective. ![]() In truth this is merely an illusion, however, since objectivity is always ultimately translated into subjective terms. When you say, “Let’s be objective about this,” it’s a suggestion for everyone to step outside their personal perspectives and to consider reality from a perspective that exists outside of them. We like to think of objective frames of reference as things that exist outside of ourselves. You’re considering that event relative to yourself. Hence, anytime you consider an event in space-time, you’re considering that event as filtered through your perceptions. So it stands to reason that your entire knowledge of space-time comes through your perceptions. Either way that knowledge came via your perceptions. Maybe you experienced those events directly, or maybe you learned about them from another source. Events and PerceptionĪll the dates and locations you have stored in your memory came from your perceptions. When and where only hold meaning when they can be translated into terms relative to your when and your where. If someone tells you a location, you naturally interpret it relative to your current location, your home, or some other location you’re familiar with. If someone gives you a date and time, you’ll naturally interpret it relative to your present moment or relative to some other event in your past or future or in your memories. When you try to define events in objective terms, you internally translate them into subjective terms anyway. To define a time, you must also use relationships, such as a time’s relationship to the present moment or to another date and time. Places are defined by relationships, such as by coordinates (relative to a coordinate system) or directions (relative to a starting location). To define a place, you need a reference location. Place and time are both relative concepts. An event is essentially a point or interval in space-time. An event is something that happens at a given place and time.
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