Cybernetics/Systems Theory and Materialist Dialectics

[heiss93]

Cybernetics is a modern scientific method of examining the internal dynamics of systems. It played a key role in the theoretical ideas of computers and robotics, and has been applied to all natural and social sciences.

From the late 1970s and 1980s, many in the USSR saw cybernetics or systems theory as a more advanced form of Marxist-Leninist Dialectical Materialism. Many in contemporary China also study cybernetics dialectically.

Here are 2 interesting articles on the topic
http://www.scribd.com/doc/126309/MATERIALIST-DIALECTICS-AS-A-PHILOSOPHICAL-BASIS-FOR-SYSTEMS-RESEARCH-By-J-M-Gvishiani

http://www.thinkartlab.com/pkl/archive/GUNTHER-BOOK/VORTRA1.html

What are your opinions?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Heiss, and full marks for continuing to flog a dead horse!

However, these articles make all the usual mistakes, and their authors consistently fail to ask searching questions of the dialectical classics. Hence, they read like so many other hack works that emerged from the former USSR and E Europe, aimed at promoting the careers of their authors by underlining their 'Marxist-Leninist' orthodoxy.

Small wonder then that there have been no practical applications of dialectics in systems theory (that is, over and above verbose gestures like these, which are no more illuminating than born-again Christian attempts to link technological advances with the Bible), and no computer firm has taken up these ideas (which helps explain why computational science in the USSR lagged behind that of the USA).

In contrast, the principles of modern formal logic feature in countless applications, especially those derived from the Propositional Calculus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate

[JimFar]

Small wonder then that there have been no practical applications of dialectics in systems theory (that is, over and above verbose gestures like these, which are no more illuminating than born-again Christian attempts to link technological advances with the Bible), and no computer firm has taken up these ideas (which helps explain why computational science in the USSR lagged behind that of the USA).

In contrast, the principles of modern formal logic feature in countless applications, especially those derived from the Propositional Calculus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_gate

I covered the applications of modern logic to the development of computer technology in a post on this board a couple of years ago. I wrote:
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Indeed concerning the role of modern logic in the development of computer technology, Rosa is actually being very modest here. The design of digital processors is based directly upon the application of Boolean algebra to the design of digital circuitry. That is something that began with the work of Claude Shannon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Shannon), who worked out how Boolean algebra could be applied to the design of telephone switching circuits as part of his master's thesis (https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/11173) at MIT. And that's just the hardware side of things. Almost every computer programmer makes at least some use of Boolean algebra in her work. Most programming languages, now a days, have a Boolean data type. All programmers find themselves writing statements involving Boolean "and's" and "or's", as well as "not's" for negation.

However, the examples cited thus far concerning the uses of Boolean algebra in both hardware design and in computer programming by no means exhaust the uses of modern logic in computer technology. The whole theory underlying computer science is built upon an area of modern logic concerned with the study of recursive functions. Kurt Gödel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Godel) developed recursive function theory in order to prove his two incompleteness theorems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems) . Alan Turing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing) upon reading Gödel's papers, sought to find an alternative way for proving the incompleteness theorems. As part of this alternative proof, he developed the notion of reducing mathematical algorithms to machines, now known as Turing machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine). According to the Church-Turing thesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church-Turing_thesis), any computation that can possibly be performed, can be carried out by a Turing machine. The notion of a Turing machine is mainly a theoretical concept but actual computers can be thought of representing to at least a first-order approximation, instantiations of universal Turing machines. This means that any computer can in theory carry out any computation that can be performed by any other computer, providing that we ignore such issues as computation time, and limitations of memory and disk storage. Thus the theory of Turing machines can help us to delimit the sorts of things that computers can and cannot do and so plays an essential role in theoretical computer science.
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Concerning systems theory and dialectics in Soviet thought. That's a subject that had a long history there. One of the earliest systems theorists was the Bolshevik theorist Aleksander Bogdanov, who was the primary target of Lenin's polemics in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism on account of his adherence to the positivism of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. Bogdanov's brand of systems theory was called tektology.
Under Stalin, cybernetics and systems theory were banned as bourgeois pseudo-sciences, but starting with the "thaw" under Khrushchev, Soviet theorists quickly embraced cybernetics and systems theory, and there were a series of debates concerning the relations between these subjects and dialectics. People there advanced a range of positions, including the position that cybernetics could replace dialectics. That position was rejected, for among other things, because it was obviously contrary to the teachings of the dialectical materialist "classics." (In the West, the British biologist John Maynard Smith, who had been a long time member of the old CPGB took the position that systems theory made dialectics obsolete). Most Soviet writers came around to the position that systems theory embodies certain dialectical ideas but that one could not reduce dialectics to systems theory.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that reminder, Jim.

[heiss93]

Couldn't binary code be seen as a validation of the dialectical law of the unity and interpenetration of opposites?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Only if you are high on something.

How can numbers 'interpenetrate' one another?

And, according to the dialectical classics, such opposites must 'inevitably' change into one another. How can a zero change into the number one, or vice versa? How can they 'struggle'?

[Hyacinth]

Under Stalin, cybernetics and systems theory were banned as bourgeois pseudo-sciences, but starting with the "thaw" under Khrushchev, Soviet theorists quickly embraced cybernetics and systems theory, and there were a series of debates concerning the relations between these subjects and dialectics. People there advanced a range of positions, including the position that cybernetics could replace dialectics. That position was rejected, for among other things, because it was obviously contrary to the teachings of the dialectical materialist "classics." (In the West, the British biologist John Maynard Smith, who had been a long time member of the old CPGB took the position that systems theory made dialectics obsolete). Most Soviet writers came around to the position that systems theory embodies certain dialectical ideas but that one could not reduce dialectics to systems theory.
This has always been my suspicion, good to know I'm not alone on this; all that is worth salvaging from dialectics can be described in systems theoretic terms, and better than it can in the confused theory of dialectics.