Can anyone who is more well read tell me if there is any philosophy work that revises the theory of dialectical materialism in light of modern scientific advances? I just finished Elementary Principles of Philosophy (FLP edition) which was extremely enlightening but some of the scientific examples are dated and it got me thinking. Physics (and all sciences for that matter) has advanced quite a bit in the past fifty years and I'd love to read a principled critique/investigation/discussion on how our current understanding of nature modifies our understanding of materialism. Also if there are any critiques of idealism in the understanding of modern science

  • ComradeBeefheart [none/use name]
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    3 years ago

    There's a bunch of great stuff out there that's good to explore. Helena Sheehan's "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science - A Critical History", basically goes through the historical development with respect to the Philosophy of Science within the Marxist tradition. Typically in the US, we basically get treated to our own history in relation to the problems and paradigmatic shifts that went on within the philosophy of science. Typically it starts with Mach, the Vienna Circle, Carnap, and then moves onto Popper and Kuhn, which turns to Lakatos and Feyerabend, etc. However, its not as if Marxism doesn't have its own intellectual tradition, with its own problems in relation to the philosophy of science, and so starting from Marx and Engels, she basically takes you through the history of ideas within the Marxist philosophy of science, and how they figure within the larger socioeconomic context in which they were brought about in. It's basically a materialist conception of the history of the philosophy of science within Marxist tradition starting with M&E up to the Comitern period.

    If you want to learn about some Marxist attempts to solve the measurement problem, maybe check out David Bohm's pilot-wave theory, which was largely overlooked then (1951) due to his then Marxist views and refusal to rat out fellow communists to HUAC. He later gave up his Marxist views in 56 after the Hungary Uprising, and ended up basically becoming more of a Hegelian, and I believe he dropped the theory. Despite that its still one of the more well known alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation, with the Many-Worlds solution probably being the more popular in media.

    I should also note that he was also overlooked due to the almost cult-like following Niels Bohr held within the scientific community. However, this wasn't limited to non-Marxists. His right-hand man, Leon Rosenfeld, professed Marxism to the degree that Pauli once ironically addressed him as the squareroot of Trotsky x Bohr. Yet, he was a staunch advocate of Bohr's complementarity to the degree that he basically tried at every turn to shut down Bohm's attempts to popularize his pilot-wave theory. In 51, Bohm received a little support from Soviet physicists in opposing the Copenhagen interpretation, but for the most part they preferred their own solutions compared to that of Bohm. Here I refer to Dmitrii Ivanovich Blokhintsev, who from what I've been able to find out on my own, may have formed something akin to a precursor to decoherence. The book I'm reading which goes over the history of the Copenhagen interpretation doesn't cover any of the Soviet physicists in depth, so my general knowledge of Soviet physicists is pretty thin.

    Lately, I've seen Carlo Rovelli talking about Lenin and Bogdanov's epistemological debate which basically ended up splitting the two apart irreconcilably. Basically, Bogdanov believed that Marxism needed an epistemology which could readily contend with the new problems posed by the advances made at the turn of the century within physics. Needless to say, but Lenin thought otherwise. If your interested in Bogdanov, check out the Bogdanov Library as they just posted some links to a mini-symposium they just recently uploaded which includes a lot a pretty neat lectures, one is aptly titled "Conversation on Philosophy of Science / Scientific Philosophy Facilitated by Mike C. Jackson: McKenzie Wark and Carlo Rovelli – Bogdanov, Lenin, and Scientific Philosophy." Also another lecture compares Bogdanov's project, Tektology, and it's relation to Stafford Beer's own beliefs and development of Cybersyn in Chile under Allende.

    • JuneFall [none/use name]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Despite that its still one of the more well known alternatives to the Copenhagen interpretation

      With plenty of problems on its own. The parts that can be converted between the established quantum systems and Bohm's ideas are mathematically identical, those that aren't don't. That the theory is giving us less insights got many problems and didn't give us new findings for the standard model are reasons it is even today now held in high regard.

      Besides my note, good post.

  • Yanqui_UXO [any]
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    edit-2
    3 years ago

    This one comes to mind although it's not about dialectical materialism really (why that might be the case is in the ramblings below): Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . ( blurb here )

    There is this constant debate in the philosophy of science , whether philosophy--or philosophizing--should be subordinate to science or not. The underlying problem here, is whether you want to say that science is sort of the final instance on "discovering" truths about the world, or whether it is philosophy. In Western bourgeois societies science, of course, has held much more authority, and as the result, you get all kinds of 20th century near-philosophic disciplines trying to present themselves as sciences: semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis to some extent, and even before that, dialectical materialism is presented as a science by its proponents. In a way, or in my personal opinion at least, the choice is irreconcilable. We could ask: how can we update dialectical materialism based on new scientific discoveries? Or we could ask: what can dialectical materialism tell us about the status of current science? This too, in a way, is class struggle. Or bourgeois clan struggle. Between humanities scholars and stem scholars. I don't know how scientists explain why they are so very important, but from the classical Marxist perspective it is very clear that all knowledge production is subject to the dialectic, so from that perspective it would be strange to ask "What can science say about the dialectic?" It could still be asked, of course, if there is some sort of scientific paradigm that contradicts the tenets of dialectical materialism. But then we face a new problem: on what grounds do we verify whether this new scientific paradigm is "correct" or preferable to dialectical materialism? Because the two have different verification procedures. Which one to choose? So we're back at the question of what should be subordinate to what: science to the dialectic or dialectic to science.

    Philosophy wouldn't be philosophy if there wasn't an attempt to reconcile that too. There are those who would say that neither should be subordinate, that each has their own "domain" in which they are "true" but these domains cannot/should not be applied universally. Foucault's "knowledges" (note the plural) for example. I don't recommend reading his Archaeologies of Knowledge if you aren't comfortable with French philosophy and are more on the "science" side, but his essay "The order of discourse," although dense, makes this point in much fewer pages. He gives the example of Mendel's theory of genes. When he proposed it in the 19th century it was nonsense from the perspective of current science and was rejected, but it is certainty very much part of our current sciences. The point, for Foucault, is not that he was some unrecognized genius, but that each discipline has criteria by which statements/propositions/theories are "in the true" or they aren't. Disciplines goalkeep. Kuhn makes a very similar point with his concept of "paradigms." In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions he argues that sciences do not progress but rather jump from one paradigm to another (i.e. they are not cumulative).

    Supposedly the biggest challenge not even to the dialectical materialism specifically, but to Hegel, comes from quantum mechanics. Or, in other words, it could be said that the dialectic is very Newtonian: one force affects another force until they find an equilibrium. Quantum mechanics is magic compared to that and anything can happen. So there are philosophies that reject Hegelianism in Marx (reject the dialectic) without rejecting Marx. This would be the Deleuze & Guattari corpus. I even saw some scholars directly saying that D&G's work is a kind of Marxism for the quantum age. But also, again, from the dialectical materialist perspective, or from the purely Hegelian perspective, it is this meme that rejection of Hegelianism is just part of the dialectic itself, the negation, followed by the synthesis (Aufhebung: both negation and incorporation). So again, where is the authority that will help us verify whose claims are "truer"?

    For my money, it is always good to start with questioning the authority of science first. Even if just because the competing theories/methodologies are the underdogs, and you can never be too suspicious of that. To say nothing of the rot that is actually the academic institutions these days. Feyerabend's Against Method is not a bad book to start with, which is kind of at the leftest end of this debate, he talks about "epistemic anarchism." Latour's and Woolgar's Laboratory Life is less extreme and also a great way to start. They try to do a sociology of how scientific "facts" are constructed, i.e. what actually happens on the ground, in a laboratory, between scientists, to come to a consensus about how to read a line on a graph.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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      3 years ago

      Or, in other words, it could be said that the dialectic is very Newtonian: one force affects another force until they find an equilibrium. Quantum mechanics is magic compared to that and anything can happen.

      You're assigning a semantic value to something that doesn't have any bearing on the domain of society or history. It sparks the philosophical imagination, sure. But science is an exercise of building abstract models that are better at empirically predicting reality within a certain parameter space. The point is that the value has always been in the empirical and then technological use of the model.

      • Yanqui_UXO [any]
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        3 years ago

        You'll have to unpack this for it to make sense to me, but from where I come from everything is semantics. There is no outside of language. Every discipline is a "language game" (late Wittgenstein) and that includes mathematical formulas.

        • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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          3 years ago

          Why does quantum mechanics say something to you that you take to be true about understanding history and sociality? Do you axiomatize science as metaphysics and epistemology? Do you believe that humans are inherently lacking freedom of will, constrained by the whimsy of quantum probabilities? And if so, how does that result in a theory that differs in the slightest from fully deterministic Newtonianism? Ought we draw yet other concepts from the equally abstractly compelling Einsteinian physics of general relativity, a theory that fundamentally cannot be squared with the quantum theory?

          • Yanqui_UXO [any]
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            edit-2
            3 years ago

            Why does quantum mechanics say something to you that you take to be true about understanding history and sociality?

            It doesn't. My understanding of quantum mechanics is extremely superficial. It seems cool and interesting, as a thought exercise, but at the end of the day I am living a very Newtonian life.

            Do you axiomatize science as metaphysics and epistemology?

            I don't understand this question, but here's an answer anyway: Not science but sciences, or better disciplines, as far as I am concerned. There is no unified science. Whether they like it or not all disciplines are based on some metaphysical assumptions and they certainly cannot do without some epistemology. For all disciplines, including philosophy, these are pre-scientific, pre-disciplinary, pre-philosophical. In other words, all knowledges are based on a set of axioms that cannot be proven (which does not mean at all that these disciplines are not useful/productive).

            Do you believe that humans are inherently lacking freedom of will, constrained by the whimsy of quantum probabilities?

            I don't know. I love Spinoza though. I didn't make any claims about the freedom of will, although it is of course a big and fun thing to talk about in philosophy. I think I am more or less a Latourian in this regard. Non-living things have some agency that affect living things' agency. Which is very dialectical of me if you ask. There's neither free nor unfree agency. It doesn't have to be a binary. It shouldn't.

            abstractly compelling Einsteinian physics of general relativity, a theory that fundamentally cannot be squared with the quantum theory

            I completely agree with this assessment. To my very limited knowledge, they cannot be squared as is. Which doesn't mean either is useless, of course. Or that they cannot be synthesized. One is about "big" things, another--"small,"--still part of the same reality.

            • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
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              3 years ago

              Yeah I was really just taking issue with the previous reasoning that one could use the epistemological difference of quantum mechanics as a model to justify a need for dialectics beyond Marxism. I like Deleuze as much as the hexbear user, I just object to this particular segue into discussing its role.

              In other words, all knowledges are based on a set of axioms that cannot be proven (which does not mean at all that these disciplines are not useful/productive).

              I agree with this entirely, I see the failure of discourse largely as an ideological failure to recognize the axioms of one's own beliefs. Almost no one is clear-eyed, in other words.

              Brief note on physics, you can prove mathematically that relativity and quantum field theory are incompatible models because you can't construct a renormalizable quantum field theory in a curved space time.

              • Yanqui_UXO [any]
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                edit-2
                3 years ago

                Brief note on physics, you can prove mathematically that relativity and quantum field theory are incompatible models because you can’t construct a renormalizable quantum field theory in a curved space time.

                That's really good to know!

                I was really just taking issue with the previous reasoning that one could use the epistemological difference of quantum mechanics as a model to justify a need for dialectics beyond Marxism.

                I don't see it that way either. The question in the thread was about more recent scientific discoveries possibly modifying the dialectical view. So I suppose I tried to answer it as impartially as I could, and I assumed the biggest challenge to the theorists living, as it were, in the Newtonian age, Marx and Hegel included, was quantum mechanics. There is also cybernetics, but that's a whole different issue. I love Bateson. But personally don't think one has to commit to one paradigm at the expense of all others, as long as those still work and explain things.

                • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
                  ·
                  3 years ago

                  I assumed the biggest challenge to the theorists living, as it were, in the Newtonian age, Marx and Hegel included, was quantum mechanics.

                  Ok yeah, this is the point I don't get. What do you mean by this? In what way does QM pose a challenge to philosophers?

    • Mrtryfe [none/use name]
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      edit-2
      3 years ago

      But then we face a new problem: on what grounds do we verify whether this new scientific paradigm is “correct” or preferable to dialectical materialism? Because the two have different verification procedures. Which one to choose? So we’re back at the question of what should be subordinate to what: science to the dialectic or dialectic to science.

      Would recommend OP check out Kuhn wrt to this

      • Camboozie [he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        3 years ago

        From my understanding dialectical materialism has to be subordinated to our understanding of science. The two are linked and develop together. In the 18th century materialism was mechanical, and therefore metaphysical, because the science of mechanics was our most powerful predictive tool. This created problems in philosophy with people like Descartes theorizing that animals (and humans by extension) were basically just an amalgamation of simple machines.

        A materialist point of view requires that philosophy be subordinated to our understanding of the nature of matter, energy, and motion since it is from these understandings that we shape our societies, or at least lay the foundation.

        • Mrtryfe [none/use name]
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          3 years ago

          I largely agree with you. I think Kuhn is interesting in this regard because I feel that he does give some value to the idea of history being about material class struggle, despite Kuhn not subscribing to Marxist thought. In that way, his ideas wrt to paradigm shifts in science is important - despite the idea that science is a cascading wave of progress, history shows that what drove a lot of scientific advancement was parallel to the material needs and desires of the parties involved. This is a key point that many in the scientific fields tend to overlook, and view scientific methodology as being unerring. That's not to say the science that they're doing is right or wrong, but the historical process certainly isn't rational when it comes to scientific progress.

    • solaranus
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      edit-2
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

  • bopit [none/use name]
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    3 years ago

    Disclaimer: I don't know enough about this topic to comment on it, but I found this podcast episode to be interesting https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/06/dialectical-materialism-marxist-realism-and-quantum-mechanics/

    • Camboozie [he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      3 years ago

      Thank you comrade! I'll have to give this a thorough listen sometime soon