Hi everyone, welcome to another entry of our Short Attention Span Reading Group

The Text

We will study On Contradiction by Mao.

It is divided into 6 sections (7 if we count the very short conclusion), none of them will take you more than 20min to read (most will take less) :).

I think this essay can be summarized by its first sentence

The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.

And this is all it studies, starting to what is the difference between dialectics and metaphysics, the law of contradiction, what are contradictions, how are they defined, what are their different types, and so on. And of course what it means for Marxism.

The biggest question I am left with after reading this essay is the place of Nature in materialist dialectics...

Supplementary material

  • On Practice by Mao Tse-tung. It is significantly shorter than On Contradiction, and they both go hand in hand.
  • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
    ·
    4 years ago

    You are apparently unaware that sets can contain sets, so the element of set Y in your definition can itself be a set, so the output of a function can be a set.

    The position of an arbitrary particle can't empirically be known as exactly as you want because there are limitations to measuring devices, as you are apparently also unaware.

    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      You are apparently unaware that sets can contain sets, so the element of set Y in your definition can itself be a set, so the output of a function can be a set.

      Nope, like I said, it can be a vector, or a set, if you like. But it's always going to be the same unique set for a given input

      limitations to measuring devices, as you are apparently also unaware.

      Which has also nothing to do with the uncertainty principle; it's independent of any sort of technological limitations.

      • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I agree. I earlier thought by 'unique', you meant unique in the sense that no other input produced the same output, but I see that I was mistaken. Since I see what you mean, I don't know why you said it, because I never implied that a function could give different outputs for the same input. The same output set would always be produced for the same input set in what I said.

        Now that we're agreed that a function can output a set, a set of positions at a point in time can be transformed by a function into a set of positions at a later time, meaning that it's theoretically possible for kinematics of a more complicated variety to handle the motion of particles with multiple simultaneous positions.

        As far as the uncertainty principle, I may or may not be wrong about it, but my main point stands: empirically, we don't know whether moving particles have unique instantaneous positions or not because we can't measure to the exactness needed to determine that. Theoretically, this seems to be the case as well, which is why I mentioned the Planck length.

        One possible alternative would be that it could be that the particle occupies all the positions of a too-small-to-measure segment along the direction of travel, for example. I'm not saying that this is the case. I'm merely trying to give the benefit of the doubt to Engels. I don't want to summarily dismiss his work just because it doesn't meet my preconceptions of how kinematics work.

        • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Now that we’re agreed that a function can output a set, a set of positions at a point in time can be transformed by a function into a set of positions at a later time, meaning that it’s theoretically possible for kinematics of a more complicated variety to handle the motion of particles with multiple simultaneous positions.

          Of course it's possible to describe all motion in such a formalism, but why?

          Imagine a particle moving in R^1 at 1 unit/second that occupies, at time t=0, the position x = 0. How would you meaningfully write the motion of this particle as a multi-valued function, and what is the benefit of doing so, apart from shoehorning in Engels' conclusion?

          I don’t want to summarily dismiss his work just because it doesn’t meet my preconceptions of how kinematics work

          It's not that it doesn't meet ones preconceptions; It can be made compatible with any physical/mathematical theory, and any physical mathematical theory can be made compatible with it. But that's true of essentially any axiomatic assertion on the nature of things, so I don't know what makes the law of contradiction/the dialectic particularly meaningfully.

          • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            As far as why I personally proposed that formalism, it was because you claimed that multiple positions implied a non-function relation, which isn't necessarily the case.

            • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
              ·
              4 years ago

              I mean it does; can you write a set of ordered pairs describing the motion of the particle above at certain points in time that

              1. Occupies more than 1 place at a given time
              2. Is a function

              And if so, how and why?

              • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
                ·
                4 years ago

                Sure.

                As for how, the first element of the ordered pair is a set of starting positions. The second element of the ordered pair is a set of ending positions. ({start_0, ...}, {end_0, ...}). The function is, of course, a set of these ordered pairs where each ordered pair's first element is unique in the set.

                The X in your definition of function is the same set as Y: the set of sets of positions.

                As for why, just to demonstrate that the statement was incorrect.

                  • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
                    ·
                    4 years ago

                    You mean to write the infinite set of ordered pairs of infinite sets? No, I can't quite do that, as it would take infinite time.

                    • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
                      ·
                      4 years ago

                      Not all of them, just a few of them. I think I know the solution you're couching in the abstract terms above, and I want you to explicitly lay it out so we can look at how absurd it is.

                      Let's say at t = 1, t = 1.5, and t = 3.

                      • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
                        ·
                        4 years ago

                        It doesn't quite matter how absurd it appears to you. What matters is that it fulfills the definition of function you said it didn't.

                        • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]
                          ·
                          4 years ago

                          Sure it matters. I've already acknowledged you can shoe-horn the assertion into any system. But I've also pointed out that this makes the assertion meaningless.

                          So now I'm looking to see if you can provide me a kinematic example of a particle moving in R1 occupying two places at once, where the second point it's occupying isn't meaningless nonsense.

          • ChaiTRex [none/use name]
            ·
            4 years ago

            As far as how it could be done in that hypothetical world: you move each position according to how far the velocity says it would move and you return the set of results.

            [Edited because this webpage is wildly closing the editing field and either deleting or submitting the contents of it]

            As far as why? Generality for the theory. No one cares what kinematics says about the movement of particular dust particles on a particular exoplanet, but it's nice to know that kinematics works generally. The same would be true for dialectics.

            The point of dialectics is what can be predicted usefully from it, I think. I'm still new to it, so I'm still waiting to see what that is. The thing about motion isn't that useful, it's more a thing about making the theory general, but there should be results that are useful.