As there are no positive feedback loop systems, everything is dialectical (acting agent or process with a negative feedback loop is synthesized into describing system as a whole, both the actor and the limit, providing new holistic view)
But no, dialectics is about processes, not facts, and thus in science a sane way for dialectics is theory developments among community (purely socially idealistic theory of science, if we take hegelian) or searching for limits of something (where “antithesis” starts to play a role), even in thought experiments, to find the counteracting forces or logic. Particle moving in empty space is not, per se, a process, in its own frame it’s stationary and without any reference you can’t even determine if it’s moving. not everything is useful to be thought about as a system or process, sometimes models do just fine job of describing stuff
Like say a light reflection, without thinking too much about how it works you can perfectly well construct a shitty telescope, just knowing that angle of incidence and angle of reflection are equal. But then you can start thinking about process of reflection, would it work with 1 atom thin mirror (no), would it work with very thin stripes of metal (oops, got a rainbow), would it work with non metal (yes, but weird stuff with polarization), would it work with light intensity bigger than heat dissipation (also no), the process of reflection contains within it the limits of what you can do, but most of the time you don’t care about them, and simple law gives you enough info (but doesn’t describe those limits, and thus you construct a new law or model when you run into them, meanwhile underlying process was always the same)
just as well you can construct materialistic social dialectics of science, for example you can’t make a looking glass without material advances in glass making and polishing stuff by some nerds in venice. you can invent most beautiful theories of light imaginable in ancient egypt, won’t bring you any closer to making lasers. science and applied engineering/materials exist in very tight (dialectical) relationships, you invent new stuff to investigate something, than new stuff is used somewhere else to discover something else, they coexist and push each other and limit each other
I’ve written and deleted like ten paragraphs in this thread and your comment, while sometimes meandering (which I very much also am), gets after a major core of what I wanted to say.
There are comments here suggesting that nature contains contradictions. The idea that you can believe that your philosophy is rational and also that the natural world bends in any way to your perception is nonsensical. Dialectics can be applied to anything that humans perceive, but only to the part of it that resides in our perception. It cannot ever be applied to the underlying thing.
Why? World doesn’t bend to perceptions, it simply is, but processes, those we observe, and there positive feedback loops would be our friendo not containing contradictions for this silly game.
This side of black hole formation (and even there, for outside observer, the limits are in the possible metric deformation and resulting black hole is a resolution, hiding singularity from us forever (maybe, pending evaporation), big bang and universe evolution, and maybe some quantum effect im missing, we don’t have those, be it due to conservation of energy or whatever. Might just be they exist, then we’ll have to construct them, or they are outside of perceptions, making their existence trivial from science perspective (you can make a lot of predictions of things which cannot ever be observed, wouldn’t be science tho).
Laws and equations don’t describe the underlying thing, they describe a model which sufficiently matches observations and makes predictions, which, core leap in philosophy of science we assume, are better matched to reality. You can always say reality is completely unknowable, but then - why science works, what changes with better model? Some outside creature making fun of us?
You are assuming what humans perceive is not reality. That implies that the human brain is capable of creating something which is, somehow, outside of nature, i.e. supernatural. It is to embrace dualism and to abandon materialism. There can be no consistent materialist position that denies the reality of perception. This was pointed out long ago by Feuerbach.
The arguments in favor of supernatural perception are always incoherent.
The “argument of limited perception” argues that we cannot perceive all of reality at once, therefore we cannot perceive reality at all. For example, they would point to the fact that certain things can block you from seeing all of reality and thus getting a full picture of it, like being trapped in Plato’s cave, being a brain in a vat, being in a simulation, etc. We obviously cannot perceive all of reality at once, sometimes we even need tools to see things like ultraviolet light. But none of these things imply we cannot perceive reality at all. That is another leap which such an argument does not get you there at all.
The “argument from illusion” argues that you can be tricked based on what you perceive and therefore what you perceive cannot be real. This is nonsense. To be “tricked” implies you misinterpreted something. It does not imply you somehow “misperceived” something. Interpretation and perception are not the same things. A magician can use slight-of-hand to trick people into thinking he is conducting magic, but that does not prove that the people who observed the magician perform their trick somehow “misperceived” the magician. They may cleverly hide certain things so you don’t see them, and this limited perspective may make you inclined to misinterpretation, but if you misinterpret what the magician does, that is a fault of your interpretation, not a fault of your perception. You still perceived everything correctly that was available for you to perceive. Magicians, your brain, the laws of physics, etc, many things can influence what you perceive in a way that may make you inclined to misinterpretation if you are not careful, but all of these things are physical things in the real world, and so you are always perceiving them “correctly,” and if you misinterpret them, that is your own fault, not reality’s fault for tricking you.
Also, dialectics denies the underlying “thing.” I actually disagree with Lenin here, I think he misinterpreted Engels. I found it pretty clear from Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” and his “Anti-Durhing” that he is very much denying the underlying thing-in-itself, because Engels had a holistic view of nature. Nothing actually exists as a thing-in-itself. Nature is one indivisible whole, and “things” are abstractions created by humans as a way to break nature up into chunks that are easier to deal with conceptually.
Indeed, Engels stresses a lot in “Dialectics of Nature” that, if you analyze any “thing” more closely, the boundaries which separate that “thing” from everything else clearly become more and more ambiguous, before disappearing of itself. This is why he says, in “Anti-Durhing,” that “definitions” are unscientfic, because it is useless to stress over trying to rigorously define and categorize things, because these categories always break down upon deeper analysis anyways.
In my opinion, the laws of dialectics are not even fundamental. They are in fact derivative of the assumption that nature is holistic and this chunking is epistemic. If you start with that premise, then the laws of dialectics logically follow. The law of contradiction arises from the fact that breaking up a holistic reality into chunks cannot be done without error. There will always be disagreement between your idealized “thing” and the real world due to the interconnections between that “thing” and its environment that are lost in this chunking.
The “metaphysicians” that Engels attacked were those who falsely equate the chunked reality for true reality, as if reality is actually divisible into things-in-themselves, which can be understood entirely independently from everything else. If you adopt that point of view, then you run into many identity paradoxes, such as the Ship of Theseus paradox, the Water-H2O paradox, the teletransportation paradox, and arguably even the mind-body problem. But Engels is clear he rejects identity, even saying he rejects the law of identity as fundamental (A=A) but as a high-level abstraction.
All identity paradoxes arise from falsely taking the abstract categories as equivalent to reality. The point of dialectics is to recognize that they are not equivalent to reality, and to construct a logical framework to make sense of reality within this framework.
“Indeed, to some extent, it has always been both necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, and to separate them, so as to reduce his problems to manageable proportions; for evidently, if in our practical technical work we tried to deal with the whole of reality all at once, we would be swamped…However, when this mode of thought is applied more broadly…then man ceases to regard the resulting divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and his world as actually constituted of separately existent fragments…fragmentation is continually being brought about by the almost universal habit of taking the content of our thought for ‘a description of the world as it is’. Or we could say that, in this habit, our thought is regarded as in direct correspondence with objective reality. Since our thought is pervaded with differences and distinctions, it follows that such a habit leads us to look on these as real divisions, so that the world is then seen and experienced as actually broken up into fragments.”
As there are no positive feedback loop systems, everything is dialectical (acting agent or process with a negative feedback loop is synthesized into describing system as a whole, both the actor and the limit, providing new holistic view)
But no, dialectics is about processes, not facts, and thus in science a sane way for dialectics is theory developments among community (purely socially idealistic theory of science, if we take hegelian) or searching for limits of something (where “antithesis” starts to play a role), even in thought experiments, to find the counteracting forces or logic. Particle moving in empty space is not, per se, a process, in its own frame it’s stationary and without any reference you can’t even determine if it’s moving. not everything is useful to be thought about as a system or process, sometimes models do just fine job of describing stuff
Like say a light reflection, without thinking too much about how it works you can perfectly well construct a shitty telescope, just knowing that angle of incidence and angle of reflection are equal. But then you can start thinking about process of reflection, would it work with 1 atom thin mirror (no), would it work with very thin stripes of metal (oops, got a rainbow), would it work with non metal (yes, but weird stuff with polarization), would it work with light intensity bigger than heat dissipation (also no), the process of reflection contains within it the limits of what you can do, but most of the time you don’t care about them, and simple law gives you enough info (but doesn’t describe those limits, and thus you construct a new law or model when you run into them, meanwhile underlying process was always the same)
just as well you can construct materialistic social dialectics of science, for example you can’t make a looking glass without material advances in glass making and polishing stuff by some nerds in venice. you can invent most beautiful theories of light imaginable in ancient egypt, won’t bring you any closer to making lasers. science and applied engineering/materials exist in very tight (dialectical) relationships, you invent new stuff to investigate something, than new stuff is used somewhere else to discover something else, they coexist and push each other and limit each other
I’ve written and deleted like ten paragraphs in this thread and your comment, while sometimes meandering (which I very much also am), gets after a major core of what I wanted to say.
There are comments here suggesting that nature contains contradictions. The idea that you can believe that your philosophy is rational and also that the natural world bends in any way to your perception is nonsensical. Dialectics can be applied to anything that humans perceive, but only to the part of it that resides in our perception. It cannot ever be applied to the underlying thing.
Why? World doesn’t bend to perceptions, it simply is, but processes, those we observe, and there positive feedback loops would be our friendo not containing contradictions for this silly game.
This side of black hole formation (and even there, for outside observer, the limits are in the possible metric deformation and resulting black hole is a resolution, hiding singularity from us forever (maybe, pending evaporation), big bang and universe evolution, and maybe some quantum effect im missing, we don’t have those, be it due to conservation of energy or whatever. Might just be they exist, then we’ll have to construct them, or they are outside of perceptions, making their existence trivial from science perspective (you can make a lot of predictions of things which cannot ever be observed, wouldn’t be science tho).
Laws and equations don’t describe the underlying thing, they describe a model which sufficiently matches observations and makes predictions, which, core leap in philosophy of science we assume, are better matched to reality. You can always say reality is completely unknowable, but then - why science works, what changes with better model? Some outside creature making fun of us?
You are assuming what humans perceive is not reality. That implies that the human brain is capable of creating something which is, somehow, outside of nature, i.e. supernatural. It is to embrace dualism and to abandon materialism. There can be no consistent materialist position that denies the reality of perception. This was pointed out long ago by Feuerbach.
The arguments in favor of supernatural perception are always incoherent.
The “argument of limited perception” argues that we cannot perceive all of reality at once, therefore we cannot perceive reality at all. For example, they would point to the fact that certain things can block you from seeing all of reality and thus getting a full picture of it, like being trapped in Plato’s cave, being a brain in a vat, being in a simulation, etc. We obviously cannot perceive all of reality at once, sometimes we even need tools to see things like ultraviolet light. But none of these things imply we cannot perceive reality at all. That is another leap which such an argument does not get you there at all.
The “argument from illusion” argues that you can be tricked based on what you perceive and therefore what you perceive cannot be real. This is nonsense. To be “tricked” implies you misinterpreted something. It does not imply you somehow “misperceived” something. Interpretation and perception are not the same things. A magician can use slight-of-hand to trick people into thinking he is conducting magic, but that does not prove that the people who observed the magician perform their trick somehow “misperceived” the magician. They may cleverly hide certain things so you don’t see them, and this limited perspective may make you inclined to misinterpretation, but if you misinterpret what the magician does, that is a fault of your interpretation, not a fault of your perception. You still perceived everything correctly that was available for you to perceive. Magicians, your brain, the laws of physics, etc, many things can influence what you perceive in a way that may make you inclined to misinterpretation if you are not careful, but all of these things are physical things in the real world, and so you are always perceiving them “correctly,” and if you misinterpret them, that is your own fault, not reality’s fault for tricking you.
Also, dialectics denies the underlying “thing.” I actually disagree with Lenin here, I think he misinterpreted Engels. I found it pretty clear from Engels’ “Dialectics of Nature” and his “Anti-Durhing” that he is very much denying the underlying thing-in-itself, because Engels had a holistic view of nature. Nothing actually exists as a thing-in-itself. Nature is one indivisible whole, and “things” are abstractions created by humans as a way to break nature up into chunks that are easier to deal with conceptually.
Indeed, Engels stresses a lot in “Dialectics of Nature” that, if you analyze any “thing” more closely, the boundaries which separate that “thing” from everything else clearly become more and more ambiguous, before disappearing of itself. This is why he says, in “Anti-Durhing,” that “definitions” are unscientfic, because it is useless to stress over trying to rigorously define and categorize things, because these categories always break down upon deeper analysis anyways.
In my opinion, the laws of dialectics are not even fundamental. They are in fact derivative of the assumption that nature is holistic and this chunking is epistemic. If you start with that premise, then the laws of dialectics logically follow. The law of contradiction arises from the fact that breaking up a holistic reality into chunks cannot be done without error. There will always be disagreement between your idealized “thing” and the real world due to the interconnections between that “thing” and its environment that are lost in this chunking.
The “metaphysicians” that Engels attacked were those who falsely equate the chunked reality for true reality, as if reality is actually divisible into things-in-themselves, which can be understood entirely independently from everything else. If you adopt that point of view, then you run into many identity paradoxes, such as the Ship of Theseus paradox, the Water-H2O paradox, the teletransportation paradox, and arguably even the mind-body problem. But Engels is clear he rejects identity, even saying he rejects the law of identity as fundamental (A=A) but as a high-level abstraction.
All identity paradoxes arise from falsely taking the abstract categories as equivalent to reality. The point of dialectics is to recognize that they are not equivalent to reality, and to construct a logical framework to make sense of reality within this framework.