I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I’m talking about deeply held beliefs you have that many might disagree with here or deem to be incompatible with Marxist ideology. I’m interested because I doubt everyone here is an ideological robot who all share the same uniformity in belief
I don’t believe in applying dialectics to the natural sciences.
To clarify: i think dialectical materialism is an excellent framework for analyzing social phenomena…basically everything to do with human-to-human interaction, be it history, the development of human societies, socio-political relations in society, the political economy, international relations, even to some degree the psychology of human behavior. There it works great, and demonstrably so imo.
But i think attempts by (some) Marxists to extend the framework to hard science disciplines like physics or biology are misguided. Dialectics is not some mystical, metaphysical or universal truth, it is a heuristic method with a specific field of application within which it has a lot of analytic power but if misapplied outside of the context that it was made for this can lead to some silly pseudo-scientific conclusions.
If this is an “un-Marxist” opinion so be it, but basically where the natural sciences are concerned i gravitate toward a more straightforward methodological materialism. Some Marxists may call this a form of “vulgar materialism”.
have you read engels’ dialectics of nature?
I am familiar with the basic jist of it, and i’ve read excerpts, but no i have not read the whole thing. I have never been into the “philosophy of science” stuff. Imo if it works, it works. Trying to insert too much wishy washy philosophy into hard sciences which are about rigorous math and data just leads to metaphysical, superstitious flim flam.
i mean you do you, but marx and engels were strongly influenced by research into the hard sciences, particularly darwin’s theory of evolution at the time. evolution is a pretty good case study for the dialectics of nature: for example, the relation between a predator and its prey. the development of the contradiction changes both entities over time in what we understand as evolution.
einstein’s theory of relativity also pretty well demonstrates the dialectics of nature. rather than space and time being separate entities, they are one thing that form a unity of opposites. the same is true for matter and energy in the famous E=mc^2: matter is energy, but at the same time they are not. there is a unity of opposites.
i always liked the fact that absolute zero can’t be reached as a good example of how the only permanent thing is change, given that heat is simply particle motion. qubits in quantum computing are also another fun example, where there’s a dialectic between 1 and 0 rather than there being a simple binary (which itself is a dialectic, but simplified and less gradient).
i get feeling like it’s bullshit and nonsense, and tbh if it even is an unpopular opinion it’s at least a very common one. i felt exactly the same way about dialectics: “this can be applied to EVERYTHING? that’s nuts, this is nuts.” but, the more examples you can apply it to yourself, the more sense it will make over time. just my two cents.
I understand that Marx and Engels were very well educated about the science of their time.
All i’m saying is that reducing everything to some kind of duality just feels like an oversimplification to me. Why always two? Why not three? What is so special and magical about the number two?
Like there’s more to an ecosystem than just predator and prey. But if you really want to arrive at that magical number two then sure you can ignore everything else. But evolution is driven by a lot of different factors, not just the contradiction between two opposing forces.
As for relativity, for space and time to form a “unity of opposites” you would have to assume that space and time are in some way “opposites” of each other. But are they really? What does it even mean to be an “opposite” of space or time?
Also, if you were fixated on the number four instead of the number two, you could easily say that relativity actually revolves around groups of four: three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. The math we use in relativity is based on four-dimensional vectors, not two-dimensional ones.
And the binary system is also in some ways kind of arbitrary, no? Early computer scientists could have chosen a system in base three. Instead of high and low voltage they could have built computers based on high, medium and low voltages. The only reason they chose the former was simplicity. But there is nothing inherently more fundamental to binary than there is to say hexadecimal, or to the regular decimal number system that we use in everyday life.
Even the thing about change…ok on the scales that are relevant to humans sure, everything is constantly changing. But there are some things that don’t change as far as we can tell…the fundamental constants for instance…the laws of physics don’t seem to change. Or maybe they do. Who knows. The point is that only observation can tell us how things really work, we can’t just assume that because a theory works in one context (the framework of dialectical materialism being accurate in the social, historical and economic context) that it must therefore be true in all others.
It seems to me like what you are doing is taking all of these random facts and looking for ways to interpret them in such a way as to validate your preconceived notions. It’s forcing the data to fit the theory instead of the other way around. If you want to see dialectics in everything, then you will. Humans are good at recognizing patterns even when they’re not necessarily there.
Nothing against people who find it useful or comforting in some way to interpret everything through this one particular lens of duality and change, just like i have nothing against people who find it easier to understand reality through the lens of their religious beliefs, but i personally remain skeptical of the notion of one all-encompassing universal philosophical theory to describe all of reality.
i don’t mean to be a dick in a thread about controversial opinions, but tbh it just sounds like you haven’t read much theory on dialectical materialism. all of the examples i gave were extremely bare-bones in order to give you a wider variety of examples. delving into the specificity of each one becomes extremely complicated.
two is important because it’s the number that defines a relationship between things. a relationship between two things is, by nature of the definition, not a relationship with any other thing. this sounds like an oversimplification to you, and it is. let’s take the example of alice, bob and carol to explain dialectical systems:
this explains how a system of three can be pared down to all its different and theoretically separate relations. of course, there are systems of four, or five, or five hundred, or billions, and the same thing is true in these cases as well. what groups or categories are relevant (i.e. ontology) is determined both by reality and the human interpretation of it. in the context of evolution: yes, one singular predator/prey relationship is one of thousands upon thousands of relationships within one ecosystem. there’s plenty of writing on marxist ecology you can read to better understand this
as far as unity of opposites, it just sounds like you don’t understand what the term means. a unity of opposites means that two things both define and exclude each other. in the case of matter and energy: we cannot truly understand matter outside of its relationship to energy, and yet matter is not energy and vice versa. i do not know enough about the math of general relativity to go into deeper specifics with you there, but i’m sure you could find reading on it if you were so inclined.
clearly the computational example is not sufficient for or useful to you, since your issue is that you don’t believe diamat applies to the natural sciences outside of human experience, so i will skip this.
as far as how we reach conclusions, again this is pretty basic theory in terms of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge, which can really be understood as the understanding of the application of the scientific method to all human life and experience. correct ideas, i.e. correct theories, can only be understood as such via the testing of those theories (experiment and observation), i.e. practice. this is the primary reason why i can give you an unending number of examples, but none will really be meaningful unless you apply and understand one yourself. at the same time, just because a theory is a theory does not necessarily mean it’s wrong, it just means it hasn’t been tested or put to observational scrutiny yet. general relativity was only a theory (math is theory) until the bending of light was observed in real life. now that it has been sufficiently proven, no one would question our application of it in various contexts.
i know it might not seem like it, but i really, absolutely understand where you’re coming from, because it is exactly how i felt about diamat when i first started learning about it. “how can anything be applicable to ALL things? i don’t see any dialectical relationships in x example.” “how can everything be divided into two things? this makes no sense.” but, the more you learn about it and subsequently apply it to your life (both daily life and specific scholarly research), and consistently are returned with positive feedback thus indicating a correct idea, in will increasingly indicate to you its universality. this is again why i can give you examples until my fingers fall off and we would come up with the same result until you applied and tested the theory yourself, which is what i encourage you to do.
This is the best explanation I’ve read of dialectical materialism in natural science (specifically biology): http://ashipunov.me/shipunov/school/books/na_perelome_1997.pdf#page=13
“The so-called dialectical world view is by and large also the world view of the naturalists, as opposed to that of the physicalists. Naturalists have always been opposed to reductionism and to the other physicalist interpretations of the Cartesians. I would not be surprised to learn that Engels got this world view in part from reading the writings of Darwin and of other naturalists. Dialectical materialism was for Engels and Marx a general philosophy of nature. It was achieved primarily by an elimination of physicalism and Cartesianism. Would that be a philosophy of science that fully accounts for the autonomous characteristics of biology? The viewpoint I have presented in my recent book “This is Biology” is that it is necessary to develop the characteristics and principles of the various “provincial” sciences, such as physics and biology, in order to construct eventually a comprehensive Philosophy of Nature, which does equal justice to all sciences.”
You can also read the works cited by Meyr in the essay of Levins and Lewontin. Also, JBS Haldane writing in “Dialectical Materialism and Modern Science”.
Yeah, see, no offense to the comrades who take that view, but that all just sounds like bullshiting and nonsense to me. I guess in this debate i come down on the side of the physicalists. I just don’t see any reason why dialectics should be applied to physics. To me that’s too ad hoc.
Well…we were asked for unpopular opinions for a Marxist and mine certainly seems to fit the bill.
So, take biology as an example. Specifically how we organize organisms into taxonomies. It’s completely inadequate to the task. It’s a lossy heuristic. Dialectics shows us that life interpenetrates in a dialectic relationship. Wherever we see two things, they are actually one unitary complex being artificially divided by human cognition.
We see that in physics as well as we start to understand that particles are not impenetrable billiard balls but in fact are a “one divides into two” phenomenon based on the quantum foam unitary that gives rise to what we call fundamental particles.
Dialectics points us to the fact that reality is not, in fact, a bunch of impenetrable real objects coming into contact with each other but rather that reality is in fact a unitary whole system and that all divisions we conceive of are in fact lossy heuristics.
Eh…no, sorry. I don’t buy that. But as i said, no offense if you believe that. To me that just sounds too much like religious talk.
Wait, what? It is a matter of scientific fact that taxonomies are lossy heuristics. It is the current prevailing theory that fundamental particles emerge from quantum foam. What exactly do you not agree with?
Taxonomies are an attempt to categorize into neat little boxes something that exists on a spectrum. But we need those kinds of boxes. That is how we understand reality. It may be a flawed heuristic but is is very useful and the best we have.
As for fundamental particles, i don’t particularly like the expression “quantum foam”, but yes, according to our current understanding particles are best described as quantized excitations in their respective fields. I know. I took about two years of graduate courses where I had to do a bunch of those calculations, drawing Feynman diagrams, evaluating path integrals, etc. I’m not disagreeing with the facts, i just don’t see what this has to do with dialectics. You’re making a leap of logic that for me just doesn’t follow.
Also i think sometimes people take the language used by scientists to describe nature too literally. I mean have you ever thought about the fact that these are ultimately just models? They are useful for describing reality but they are not necessarily what reality IS. For instance the probability density functions that we use in quantum physics are very accurate at making predictions, but are they really physical? And does it even matter? So long as the models are useful and practical and the math works should we even care?
Do you get what i mean? Reality and the language or the math that we use to describe reality are two different things. My view is that i don’t really care what the actual “reality” is so long as the model works.
Trying to interpret some kind of metaphysical “yin-yang” type duality in everything seems forced and unscientific to me. Maybe there is duality in some things and maybe there isn’t in others. Maybe what we interpret as duality only looks like that because of the way we describe things. Maybe we are seeing what we want to see…“shapes in the clouds” and all that.
Also, why two sides to everything? Why not three? Why not one? What is so special and magical about the number two? Again this all sounds like magical thinking…and it’s just not for me. And i will admit it can be useful at times to look at the natural world through a dialectical lens. But preconceptions can also sometimes blind us…
It’s even more than that they exist on a spectrum, they are constantly changing in relationship with their context. It’s systems theory. Every organism is a system, not an impenetrable entity. Each part of the system is also a system. Each system reacts to and influences its environment. Each species is a collection of systems grouped by subsets of properties of those systems. And those properties emerge from system dynamics. This is dialectical.
Right, again, not impenetrable entities but system dynamics.
Yes, I have. But dialectics are not about metaphysics. Dialectics is a methodology that resists models that propose impenetrable entities and instead requires treating all posited entities as systems in themselves, systems that themselves are composed of systems and participate in systems. It’s all models, dialectics just refuses to rest on models of impenetrable entities bouncing off each other.
The critique is that all models work and don’t work, but only dialectics is a methodology for managing the gaps and boundaries between models. Taking biological taxonomy as an example, the model doesn’t work for a lot of things and there is no alternative model to cover those things well. Dialectics would critique that the first model fails explicitly because it relies too heavily on impenetrable entities. It’s useful, but it has boundaries that dialectics can cross.
That is not what dialectical materialism is. That’s what the Hegelian dialectic is. Dialectical materialism is about causality in a universe qua system.
I don’t think there’s any requirement of “two”. Two is just one more than one. It’s quite clear to everyone that when you decompose a system it is not necessarily two things. Marx didn’t identify only two classes nor only two historical modes of production, etc. Two is easier to think about, it’s used instead of the word “many”.
Because there is only one one, and that is everything, or what we call the universe. If we prove the multiverse, than the one thing is the totality of the multiverse. Essentially, everything that exists is contained in the thing that is unitary. That’s the only logical unitary that exists. Everything is a component of “existence” and existence is a system composed of systems.
I think perhaps the problem is that you’re talking about attempting to do science within the framing of ontological models that posit impenetrable entities, and in this case, you’re correct, using dialectics is very difficult if not impossible. What dialectics does is show us that these lossy models leave gaps between them and that when we dig in further we find that the categories that we assumed are rigid are in fact porous and nothing is actually fitting into the categories except through social agreement. And its dialectics that can support us in navigating between models, developing new models, and critiquing existing models accurately.
I don’t disagree with anything you said there. It’s just that we seem to be working with different definitions of dialectics. Yours seems to be much more broad and all-encompassing. I am just wondering how useful it even is to call it dialectics at that point.
Anyway without getting too sidetracked, i guess what i’m taking from all this is that perhaps i should correct my original point to clarify that what i disagree with is the tendency i have seen from some Marxists to apply the Hegelian dialectic to nature.
Viewing everything in terms of contradictions, of thesis, negation and synthesis, seems unnecessarily restrictive and forced. Your more general take on dialectics in nature being about systems that interact and change is much more reasonable, but also sort of feels redundant…i mean that’s kind of just stating the obvious don’t you think? It’s a bit of a truism.
Interesting. Have you come across any examples of which to promote your thesis?
It’s not so much a thesis as the rejection of one. Giving an example would mean citing an instance in which dialectics fails to accurately describe the natural world. The problem is that that is subjective. I could say “i don’t see any dialectical characteristics in phenomenon X” and someone else could say that they do, or could simply have a broader definition of dialectics than what i am working with.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t dialectics just the philosophy of change? I don’t understand what you mean by methodological materialism.
Dialectics = reality is always changing
Materialism = reality is stuff
Dialectical Materialism = reality is stuff that is always changing
I dunno what there is to argue about, this just seems unambiguously true to me. I’d argue that the natural sciences are actually the only places where diamat is applied in the west.