Finished B&T reading

I finally finished the reading of B&T again. It had been years since I had read it and so it was like reading a forgotten book even though I have spent much of my life thinking about it.

My impression this time especially reading the last part about clocks is how much it is an answer to Einsteinian Relativity Theory. Heidegger studied physics prior to going into philosophy and much of his work is an attempt to answer the puzzles of physics especially in light of Husserl’s Krisis. He is also trying to solve some of the deep problems of phenomenology as put forward by Husserl. At the end of the book he makes the point that Hegel was the first to say that space and time were one thing, as Einstein had proposed more recently. We can see Heidegger as attempting to show what is wrong with all present-at-hand models of physics that are objective, and how subjective accounts of phenomena are just as flawed in as much as they do not keep in mind how experience comes before the differentiation of subject and object.

All the talk about clocks and the idea of Hegel that space and time are the same thing I think is all aimed to interface with the concepts of Einstein about clocks that is the basis of the thought experiments concerning relativity. Heidegger saw himself as attempting to solve the deep problems of the relations between human beings and the strangeness of modern science in line with what Dilthey was trying to do which he mentions which was to show the relation between the human sciences and the physical sciences and how the physical sciences must be founded on the human sciences not the other way around.

Present-at-hand as a theoretical way of looking at things by thematizing them is really based on Algebraic Geometry created by Descartes. To this through the calculus Newton adds the equations for motion to get a unified picture of how physical nature works. Einstein is merely refining this by thinking about the fusion of space and time via the idea of simultaneity, and the speed of light by which clocks communicate which gives the idea of reference frames.

Pico in Four Dimensional Consciousness generalizes the idea of reference frames to the cell clocks and the clocks within the brain and we can extend that to social clocks of organisms. See Consciousness in Four Dimensions: Biological Relativity and the Origins of Thought: Richard M. Pico: 9780071354998: Amazon.com: Books

It is interesting that Heidegger’s work has not been seized on by physicists as a way to solve the disembodied aspects of physical theory that undermines Science and plagues Biology as seen in Robert Rosen’s Life Itself. For instance Terrence Deacon does not realize that Heidegger’s approach accounts for what he calls ententional abstential phenomena.

Also note that there are some experimental posts about the asymmetry of the relation between the existentials and the moments of time at the thinknet.quora.com site that were not posted here.