heiss93
29th January 2008, 19:37
I thought that some of you might be interested in my defense of DiaMat at a discussion I'm having over at the Political Affairs blog.
I apologize if I was overly critical in my initial response to your point. I agree that we can not continue to uphold Nineteenth century dogma in the age of the internet. There would be no greater proof that Dialectical materialism was not a science than if it had remained unchanged from 1848 to 2008. To be fair, I'm not a scientist and my understanding of DiaMat is grounded more in politics and philosophy. Nevertheless to me it seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to claim that because individual claims of DiaMAt have been challenged by recent science, that somehow the entire Dialectical world-view is bunk.
You raised the issue of computers as a refutation of the simplicity of DiaMat. I would say that modern computers, are an elegant illustration of both quantitative into qualitative change, and the nature of contradiction. The entire coding system of modern computers is based on contradiction. A bit is either a 1 or 0, the same as saying A or ~A. Out of opposites emerge the entire system of computer programming. Likewise each individual bit is basically the same qualitatively, and the only real changes come quantitatively. And yet if enough bytes or megabytes are gathered, quantitative differences can cause vast qualitative differences in computer programming. And yet if you broke down the memory of websites, music, videos, digital artwork or any electronic information, down to its simplest parts they are in fact qualitatively identical. Thus all computer programming is in a way simply more complex illustration of the boiling water metaphor.
As for the example of the butterfly affect, I don't see how that contradicts the boiling water metaphor either. As I understand it, it is based on the fact that a small change in the quantitative levels of air pressure can have vast qualitative impacts on the weather.
Generally I find the discoveries of punctuated equilibrium supportive of DiaMat interpretations of evolution, in that the concept of "Evolutionary leaps" is supported. Objectively though I don't think anyone would argue that the complexities of human life is not a qualitative advancement over bacteria, even if as Gould says it is not yet clear which is "fittest"But I can certainly see your point in mentioning Gould's discovery that often randomness can impact on progress. To this I can only respond by saying, that this is a major flaw in some schools of DiaMat, especially the rigid interpretation put forward by Josef Stalin. The idea that either history or the physical world, is slave to some iron laws of progression is ludicrous, and I readily concede that point. Nevertheless if you look at the "big picture" of evolution and human history, there seems to be at least some truth to the idea of linear progression arising out of contradictions. Perhaps Hegel's concept of a "spiraling" history is more accurate than any idea of a linear path.
DiaMat may not yet be developed to the extent of the hard sciences, but it is certainly more than mere soft philosophy. Less than 50 years after the scientific foundations of DiaMat were laid out many of the its basic assumptions were under attack by the discoveries of "bourgeois" science. And the importance of Lenin's Empirocriticism is that he neither rejected bourgeois scientific advances nor abandoned DiaMat altogether, but instead incorporated new data into old theories. IT is this sort of scientific character towards Dialectical Materialism that has made it so adaptive and such a force int he world. There are so many components to DiaMAt that I don't think its possible for any one scientific discovery to somehow "disprove" all of DiaMat in onew swipe. DiaMat has shown itself to be an advanced scientific way of examining problems and looking at the world.
Just to close I strongly agree with your point that "some" of the 19th century baggage has to be jettisoned for DiaMat to be meaningful in the 21st century, I just feel that the scientific element of DiaMat is more significant, than you seemed to imply. I thank you for the many thought provoking questions you have raised about the validity of DiaMat, and have learned a lot from this discussion with you.
I apologize if I was overly critical in my initial response to your point. I agree that we can not continue to uphold Nineteenth century dogma in the age of the internet. There would be no greater proof that Dialectical materialism was not a science than if it had remained unchanged from 1848 to 2008. To be fair, I'm not a scientist and my understanding of DiaMat is grounded more in politics and philosophy. Nevertheless to me it seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to claim that because individual claims of DiaMAt have been challenged by recent science, that somehow the entire Dialectical world-view is bunk.
You raised the issue of computers as a refutation of the simplicity of DiaMat. I would say that modern computers, are an elegant illustration of both quantitative into qualitative change, and the nature of contradiction. The entire coding system of modern computers is based on contradiction. A bit is either a 1 or 0, the same as saying A or ~A. Out of opposites emerge the entire system of computer programming. Likewise each individual bit is basically the same qualitatively, and the only real changes come quantitatively. And yet if enough bytes or megabytes are gathered, quantitative differences can cause vast qualitative differences in computer programming. And yet if you broke down the memory of websites, music, videos, digital artwork or any electronic information, down to its simplest parts they are in fact qualitatively identical. Thus all computer programming is in a way simply more complex illustration of the boiling water metaphor.
As for the example of the butterfly affect, I don't see how that contradicts the boiling water metaphor either. As I understand it, it is based on the fact that a small change in the quantitative levels of air pressure can have vast qualitative impacts on the weather.
Generally I find the discoveries of punctuated equilibrium supportive of DiaMat interpretations of evolution, in that the concept of "Evolutionary leaps" is supported. Objectively though I don't think anyone would argue that the complexities of human life is not a qualitative advancement over bacteria, even if as Gould says it is not yet clear which is "fittest"But I can certainly see your point in mentioning Gould's discovery that often randomness can impact on progress. To this I can only respond by saying, that this is a major flaw in some schools of DiaMat, especially the rigid interpretation put forward by Josef Stalin. The idea that either history or the physical world, is slave to some iron laws of progression is ludicrous, and I readily concede that point. Nevertheless if you look at the "big picture" of evolution and human history, there seems to be at least some truth to the idea of linear progression arising out of contradictions. Perhaps Hegel's concept of a "spiraling" history is more accurate than any idea of a linear path.
DiaMat may not yet be developed to the extent of the hard sciences, but it is certainly more than mere soft philosophy. Less than 50 years after the scientific foundations of DiaMat were laid out many of the its basic assumptions were under attack by the discoveries of "bourgeois" science. And the importance of Lenin's Empirocriticism is that he neither rejected bourgeois scientific advances nor abandoned DiaMat altogether, but instead incorporated new data into old theories. IT is this sort of scientific character towards Dialectical Materialism that has made it so adaptive and such a force int he world. There are so many components to DiaMAt that I don't think its possible for any one scientific discovery to somehow "disprove" all of DiaMat in onew swipe. DiaMat has shown itself to be an advanced scientific way of examining problems and looking at the world.
Just to close I strongly agree with your point that "some" of the 19th century baggage has to be jettisoned for DiaMat to be meaningful in the 21st century, I just feel that the scientific element of DiaMat is more significant, than you seemed to imply. I thank you for the many thought provoking questions you have raised about the validity of DiaMat, and have learned a lot from this discussion with you.