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
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.