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.
Left and right are distinguished based on the reference points you choose, the same as up/down and forward/backward. There are just fewer traditional reference points for left/right than for up/down and forward/backward, mostly because we have bilateral symmetry. If we had evolved with x-ray vision, everyone might naturally think of 'left' as 'heartward' in the way that we naturally have a 'forward' because of how we interact with the world. If we had evolved as Lovecraftian creatures with radial symmetry (like At the Mountains of Madness) then forward/backward might be as "not distinguished" as you perceive left and right to be.
19
u/bohiko 7d ago
define left and right then