Interesting--I've already observed you to stand on Deleuze's shoulders, Sterner's shoulders, Simondon's shoulders, Aristotle's shoulders, Hafele and Keating's shoulders, Einstein's shoulders, and Rovelli's shoulders, by name, all in just this one post.

Oh, is that not what you meant? Did you mean you were going to take advantage of accumulated human insights while discerningly thinking about them yourself?

So did I.

That's what the shoulders-of-giants quote means.

One can observe that you recognize that, when it comes to empirical matters, it's good to include not just the conclusion, but the evidence people have gathered (or at least a way to find out what the evidence was): you reference the Hafele-Keating experiment.

Excellent!

Except you need to stand on enough shoulders so that you can understand what the results mean.

Just because there is time dilation, it does not follow that there is no arrow of time. My claim was that there very objectively is such an arrow. Indeed, "everyone" agrees, no matter how dilated the time appears to be somewhere else, exactly what caused what--which is an anthropomorphic way to state that there is an observer-independent causal ordering, because "everyone" occurs every physical process that might be affected. The order is preserved even while the temporal intervals might change. Indeed, the derivation of the Lorentz transformations is usually performed by assuming that causality--and therefore, the arrow of time--is preserved under relativity.

This is a perfect example of my point about how one ought not use poetry to replace a precise understanding.

It's hard to overturn orthodoxies when you don't understand what they are.

[Note: I commend you for the frequent references and quotes!--this is a very good strategy in general; it just isn't always enough. Feel free to ask me for support for any claim I make; I've tried to either make widely-accepted claims or present adequate reasoning from those claims to support my points. But if I have failed, let me know and I'll fill in the missing pieces.]

You quote Einstein to support your point--but it is not Einstein's authority that should cause us to accept or reject the statement, but rather our understanding of the equations that describe this model of reality. And while it's true that the equations of special relativity are time-reversible, the equations of statistical mechanics are not, and therefore forward-causality does not look like reverse-causality. Whatever Einstein meant--when talking about the death of a friend, and facing his own imminent death--if taken literally rather than poetically it is simply wrong. As large assemblages of particles, we are governed by statistical mechanics and therefore time moves forwards for us and this is not an "illusion".

Now, if one is committed to being a naive realist, then sure, one has reason to call this an "illusion". But the problem is (that flavor of) naive realism. Perhaps Einstein was simply seeking solace in rejecting that flavor of naivete. Regardless, the directionality of a process can come about because of the way in which pieces assemble, not the pieces themselves. All it takes is a process a <-> (b, c) with mobile a, b, c and non-uniformly-filled space, and you've got yourself directionality in time.

There is nothing about our cognition that matters here--in this sense it is not an "illusion". (Note that I used more precise terminology so that I would not, upon careful reading, be misunderstood to mean naive-realism-mismatch.) We are not misperceiving the asymmetry--it really is asymmetric, inasmuch as anything "really is" anything for us. The only sense in which it is an illusion is that we might guess at one way the asymmetry is implemented ("time goes forwards because forwards and backwards is different for every component" or "we think because we have an incorporeal spirit/mind that does the thinking and moves the matter that is the other part of us") and find out that the guess, while easy to conceive, is wrong. Happens all the time. Act like a realist, just don't be that naive.

Anyway, "becoming" requires the arrow of time to make any sense, Rovelli's quote only makes sense in light of the arrow of time, etc.--so I don't know what you're getting at here.

I was not complaining about having to learn the definitions of words. The complaint is about taking the same concept and rephrasing it in a way where it's harder to recognize, or replacing a more precise concept with a fuzzier one that is more prone to errors in reasoning. It's useful for grandstanding, but bad for understanding. (If the point is a chain of reasoning works even with even greater generalization and thus fewer assumptions that was previously recognized, that's cool.)

So I know (knew) what hylomorphism means, and if you feel like using the word to highlight the distinctions between components and their configurations and the emergent properties inherent in those configurations of those components, it's fine. I tend not to use it myself, because I don't want to imply that I'm distinguishing matter and form along the boundary that Aristotle did. To be clear, you'll end up having to use additional terms--at which point you probably would have been better off to carefully use more commonly-used terms. But hylomorphism can perhaps used with precision, at least if one knows the context.

In contrast, becoming imports too many connotations for precise thinking (and I do not believe the situation is terribly much better for devenir in French, but as I don't know French, my confidence is second-hand and thus rather low). I am happy to entertain crisp definitions that allow one to engage with ideas with a degree of precision that can allow one to express concepts that can very clearly and definitively be judged wrong if they are wrong. But your examples show it to be anything but--you have used it for such a wide variety of temporal processes that you may as well have meant things change over time. We have oodles of experience with that. No need to add a superfluous cognitive hurdle by using a different word / phrase that has different connotations.

Well, yes, indeed. Things change. Some changes are the result of internal regulatory processes (e.g. embryonic development). Some changes are the result of mass action and fundamental properties (e.g. phase change of carbon to diamond). And so on. But one doesn't learn much about social psychology by lumping human cognitive responses to a collection of social interactions together with condensation of fog in the Scottish moors.

Finally, you asked, "When you speak of "those bits of matter in this particular relationship," what do you suppose the nature of that relationship actually is?" I simply meant spatial relationship. If you know where some calcium atoms are in my thumb, you can have a drastically lower variance when predicting the position of oxygen atoms that started out in my nail bed than you can for oxygen atoms in the air around my thumb that were initially an equal distance away. I'm not imbuing any magical anything here--just making dumb measurements, but then cleverly noticing that some measurements correlate strongly with others. It is in this sense that objects are "real", because the measurement device can be me, you, a squirrel, a camera, a pressure sensor in a car tire, the asphalt on the road surface--we all can independently distinguish sand on the road from a rock on the road because the spatial correlations between its components have consequences: I hurt my foot on it, you see me hurting my foot on it and resolve not to make the same mistake, then I take a picture of the squirrel jumping over it while running away from the car whose tire pressure sensor is about to register a spike, etc.. Neither you nor the squirrel need to worry overly much about how these correlations are implemented with electrostatic bonds; the correlations don't depend on the understanding.

I fully, vocally, vigorously support not taking things for granted. Think for yourself, absolutely!

But I also fully, vocally, vigorously support achieving sufficient understanding to know whether one's thoughts are revealing problems or simply represent misapprehension.