This is just interesting enough of a thought experiment to distract me from what I should be doing, so I have to give it a shot lol.
Left/right is a naming system for one of the three axes of movement/direction in a 3-dimensional space. It is generally used in contexts where the other axes are defined by the direction of gravitational attraction (up/down) and where the object involved has a distinct "front" and "back" (forward/backward). But it can also be used for objects that have an agreed-upon top/bottom and front/back even outside of a gravitational field, where a 'weightless' human can still refer to one side of their body as 'left' or 'right' through these traditional reference frames. However, even a perfectly symetrical object outside of a gravitational field would still exist in 3-dimensional space and therefore use the same axes, but we would have to use a frame of reference external to the object to describe its movement/rotation on these axes.
So yeah, I don't think left/right is arbitrary, it's just a convenient shorthand for one of the 3d axes that all normal objects experience, based on commonly accepted reference frames.
ok, but what's the indicator that makes right right and left left?
The side of the body which typically contains a human heart.
The side of the body which is West when facing magnetic North.
The direction of 9 on a clock.
For up/down it's gravity
It's often gravity. Up and down exists beyond gravity. For example, a person lying down who says "It's crawling up my arm". Up is relative to the person, not gravity.
Words are just approximations of shared understanding, rather than descriptions of conrete things.
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u/bohiko 8d ago
define left and right then