“We, we keep using these words… like time and length and… and all of these things… that become… we don’t recognize that in that one ‘innocent’ decision to break off »one degree of freedom and »treat it differently… that … all of our linguistic intuition goes out the window…”

— Eric Weinstein

“You have to start all over again…”

— Roger Penrose

We have intuitions based on … nonsensically primitive ideas about the nature of time, light, distance, identity, and dimensionality. This latter term is far more important than we imagine, and relates to the concept of ‘degrees of freedom’; that is, specific ‘directions’ or ‘dimensions’ of movement, measurement, and transformation.

This concept should be imported into our ideas about thinking itself… particularly about ‘identities’.

We failed to integrate the (then) revolutionary notions of light cones, non-simultaneity, and many other features and implications of »relativity into our fundamental ideas.

So, for us, ‘identity’ and many other crucial foundations of our language… remain Newtonian… where they are not »pre-Newtonian.

And so, we have actually gone »backwards as science, particularly geometry, physics and mathematics… have advanced. It is as if their advancements, as they fail to affect our lexicons and verbal tokens, actually create some kind of bizarre gravity that draws us poor, benighted common folk »further into inveterate idiocy.

This is, in part, I think, due to the fact that our societies are regressing as our technologies advance. We somehow got the precedence wrong here… and if we do not repair this, it may be among the final mistakes that our species can make. Because we won’t survive it. Not in any way that resembles being human, intelligent, educated… or healthy.