is everything material subject to dialectics, such as chemistry, biology, atomic theory, quantum theory, etc?
One of my favourite theorists is the Marxist evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin. In books like The Dialectical Biologist and Biology as Ideology, he studied the dialectic between organism and environment to understand biology in its wider context. The role of a Marxist scientist is to be anti-Cartesian, pushing for a broader intersectional understanding of a subject with the intent of changing something through political means instead of reductively isolating things until they reinforce existing power structures. My horticulture and socioecology work is doing Marxist geography with plants that I understand through Marxist ethics/biology. Nature is the proof of dialectics and each plant is nothing but internal and external dialectics across spacetime. The praxis of the work is creating the most scientifically valid space that achieves the greatest socioecological mission over time, transforming the city’s greenspace in line with my Marxist urbanism, art theory, and pedagogy views. Nothing has been more important for my work than a formal and applied understanding of dialectical materialism.
Started reading The Dialectical Biologist just from the name just because I studied biology and seeing the name was like “probably the book I should have been aware of 20 years ago” and oh my god this thing is a banger!
Only read the intro so far and:
But nothing evokes as much hostility among intellectuals as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science. The Cartesian social analysis of science, like the Cartesian analysis in science, alienates science from society, making scientific fact and method “objective” and beyond social influence. Our view is different. We believe that science, in all its senses, is a social process that both causes and is caused by social organization. To do science is to be a social actor engaged, whether one likes it or not, in political activity. The denial of the interpenetration of the scientific and the social is itself a political act, giving support to social structures that hide behind scientific objectivity to perpetuate dependency, exploitation, racism, elitism, colonialism.
This is also 100% relevant to the thesis I am writing right now in a completely different field. It’s directly useful for the argument I am working on.
Thank you for making me aware of this!
Shitttttt I was coming to make the exact same book recommendation and a similar comment. You’re a good badger
It’s the best framework I’ve found for Marxist scientific philosophy. I’m not good enough at mathematics to thrive in a lab, but I can absorb interdisciplinary theory to spot contradictions and resolve them. Science becomes a holistic feedback loop driving community and ecological participation/wellbeing, creating the conditions for others to do natural experiments instead of just passively observing and classifying. The revolutionary project tied to it brings a moral and ethical framework that can’t be corrupted in the ways bourgeois science is.
I think there is a mistake people make (those both for and against dialectics applying to nature and non-social sciences), where they expect nature to “follow” dialectical schema, as if a molecule had to open a tiny book of communist theory to know when to dissociate. I think this understanding of dialectics comes from a long history of using scientific phenomena as examples when explaining common tools of dialectical thinking. It’s a little crude.
Rather, dialectics is about how to think better, without reifying or being one-sided. There is no reason it shouldn’t apply to everything we can think about. To claim that dialectics apply to science means that using dialectics gives us a better understanding than a “metaphysical” view (or whatever you want to call the opposite of a dialectical view), and from personal experience I very much believe it does.
This is a great point. I think when people start their journey into Marxism, they imagine dialectical materialism as prescriptive and then look towards revolutionary figures to tell them what to do. They miss the entire point that it is a way of thinking and analyzing. What we can learn from revolutionaries of the past is how they gathered and analyzed data to figure out what they could do to change their societies. It is all about observing things and studying how they really exist and then based on that, how change is inevitably going to happen and how you can interact with things to change them faster and in the direction you want the change to end up.
Yes.
This too is a great read:
At the heart of Dialectical Physics lies a radical yet rigorously grounded proposition: that contradiction is not merely a feature of our descriptions of the world, but a fundamental property of being itself. Reality, according to this framework, is not a static assemblage of immutable entities, but a continuously evolving field of oppositional forces in dynamic tension. These contradictions are not errors to be eliminated or logical inconsistencies to be corrected; rather, they are the generative principles of change, motion, and transformation. This view redefines existence not as something fixed, but as processual becoming—a ceaseless unfolding driven by the internal polarities embedded within every phenomenon.
A striking example of this ontological contradiction is the relationship between mass and space. In classical physics, mass is treated as substance—an intrinsic property of matter, dense and cohesive, capable of exerting gravitational pull. Space, conversely, is conceived as an inert background—an empty arena in which objects reside and events transpire. But Dialectical Physics reconceptualizes space as a material field in its own right, albeit one that expresses the opposite tendency of mass: instead of cohesion and concentration, space manifests decohesion and extension. Mass pulls inward; space pushes outward. Their dialectical opposition is not antagonistic but constitutive—it is through their tension that the curvature of spacetime, gravitational dynamics, and the very architecture of the cosmos arise. Gravity itself is not merely a force among others, but the dialectical negotiation between mass-induced cohesion and the expansive tension of space.
This dialectical insight extends seamlessly into the quantum realm, where the most celebrated puzzle—wave-particle duality—can be reinterpreted as an ontological unity of opposites. Quantum entities are not “really” waves or “really” particles; rather, they embody both modes of being in a unified yet internally contradictory totality. The wave aspect reveals a continuous, probabilistic, and field-like character, while the particle aspect reveals localization, discreteness, and interactional finitude. These are not separate identities, but dialectical poles within a singular, dynamic process. The apparent paradox is a reflection of our attempt to describe a dialectical reality using static classical categories. Only when we accept that the electron, the photon, or the quantum system is both continuous and discrete, depending on context, do we begin to grasp the depth of dialectical unity in quantum phenomena.
…
Thus, Dialectical Physics affirms that contradiction is not a breakdown of logic—it is the logic of breakdown and breakthrough, the method through which systems evolve, transform, and generate novelty. Whether in the behavior of subatomic particles, the formation of stars, the evolution of life, or the dialectics of society, it is through the struggle of opposing forces that reality moves forward. Motion, structure, complexity, and emergence are not byproducts—they are expressions of contradiction-in-process. To engage with the universe truthfully, we must learn not merely to observe it but to think it dialectically—to embrace contradiction as the ontological engine of all that is, was, and is yet to become.
I like Dmitry Blokhintsev’s idea that quantum mechanics just describes a statistical theory whereby the statistical dynamics depend upon the particle’s interconnections with everything else. For Blokhintsev, the particles really are just particles. That is their ontology. The waves are not ontological but are nomological, they describe the system’s statistical behavior in an ensemble of systems. If you have one particle, it will always be one particle, you will always find it in one place, it always takes one trajectory. But if you have a large number of particles (either many in one experiment, or one over many experiments), their statistical behavior in the aggregate will form wave-like patterns.
What is essential for making the idea work is that the statistical behavior of the particles really do depend upon their interconnections with everything else, so it is explicitly non-local, or as I like to refer to it, it is a “globally” stochastic theory, since the statistical behavior depends upon everything all at once. If you just try to track the individual behavior of the individual local particle and only condition on things it directly locally interacts with, then it is impossible to reproduce things like interference effects.
Indeed, this latter point is what convinced so many people that particles don’t exist. Consider in the double-slit experiment, you block one slit and capture the statistics of where the particles land on the screen given they make it through the top slit, we’ll call this P(x|top). Then, move the barrier to block the top slit and collect the statistics of where it lands on the screen given it goes through the bottom slit, we’ll call this P(x|bottom).
Physicists like Feynman and Deutsch argued that if you remove both barriers, then the statistics of where the photon shows up on the screen when unhindered, let’s call it P(x), should just be the sum of the previous two, such that P(x)=P(x|top)+P(x|bottom). We can call this the “additivity assumption.” We know in practice that P(x)≠P(x|top)+P(x|bottom), so Feynman and Deutsch argued you must believe particles don’t exist and are waves that “take all possible paths.”
But their assumption implicitly relies on a premise that Blokhintsev explicitly rejected and insisted we should drop from our thinking. If everything is interconnected, then the laws of physics do not necessarily need to admit themselves to statistical rules that only take into account what a particle directly locally interacts with. They can take into account the whole global experimental context. If we drop that assumption, then it becomes clear Feynman and Deutsch’s argument actually contain two implicit assumptions.
The additivity assumption really should be expanded out into this:
P(x|¬BB,¬BT)=P(x|top,BB)+P(x|bottom,BT)
Where BB = barrier on the bottom slit, and BT = barrier on the top slit. The statistics Feynman and Deutsch add together come from a case where there is always either a barrier on the bottom or top slit, and they expect them to add in the situation where there are no barriers at all. This only makes statistical sense if:
P(x|top,BB)=P(x|top,¬BB)
P(x|bottom,BT)=P(x|bottom,¬BT)
Meaning, the additivity assumption only logically and statistically holds if the barrier on the path a photon does not take cannot influence its behavior.
However, not only do we know it can influence its behavior, but you can even use this effect to measure the presence of something without interacting with it, because its mere presence alters the behavior of a particle that never interacts with it in a detectable way: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002
Indeed, this property is actually quantifiable, it is something known as quantum mutual information (the equation for QMI is similar but not the same as the equation for mutual information in classical statistics). If a particle moves through an environment, QMI can be used to quantify, based on the physical structure of the environment that the particle moves through, how much information on the particle is accessible to the environment.
You can just explain interference effects not by positing that the particle goes through both slits at once, but that its statistical behavior has dependence upon the presence or absence of QMI with the environment and thus its behavior has a global dependence upon the structure of the whole environment in relation to itself.
In the case of things like the double-slit experiment, placing a barrier on one of the two slits will cause a hypothetical particle that moves through the two slits to either collide with or not collide with the barrier, slightly altering the state of the barrier. The presence or absence of that slight alteration then can be used, in principle, to distinguish which slit the photon tried to go through, and thus the barrier possesses quantum mutual information on the particle.
This is a quantifiable property of the physical structure of the experiment prior to actually sending any particles through it. You can predict whether or not the particle’s marginal statistical behavior will exhibit interference effects or not without presupposing that the particle takes all possible paths like a wave, but by conditioning on QMI, which is ultimately a structural parameter in the global experimental context.
This is also why measuring a particle seems to cause interference effects to temporarily go away, not because looking at it collapses some wave back down into a particle, but because the presence of a measurement device establishes QMI between the environment (that being the measuring device) and the particle.
Indeed, you can fit any arbitrary quantum circuit to a Markov chain if you choose the Markov matrices based upon the entire experimental setup, and, in fact, quantum theory actually guarantees a single unique Markov matrix for each unitary operator given the experimental setup, and so any arbitrary quantum system can be reduced to a stochastic process.
Blokhintsev was rather critical of Einstein who believed that nature can be reduced to things which can be considered solely in compete isolation from everything else. He cautioned that we should instead be thinking of everything as interconnected and inseparable from everything else, and that locality can only be a useful approximation of reality. People who insist that everything should be explained in entirely local terms are forced to devolve into rather bizarre and incoherent metaphysics to actually make “sense” of quantum mechanics (I put it in quotation marks because rarely what they say even makes sense).
This is so interesting thanks for adding it
whole nature connected take a look
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Everything can be studied dialectically because everything has external and internal contradictions
Im the sense that scientific debate can be seen as a form of dialectics, yes.
In the sense that the krebs cycle or gravity are somehow subject to hegelianism, and you can discover scientific principles by just applying hegel hard enough at it? No. That’s just Engels getting over his skis and you can call me a menshevik for that if you want.
Hey you, you’re a menshevik!
Fair
Yes, or, at least in practice it does. You can debate if that means just that we understand everything diallectically because that’s just how our perception and knowledge faculties are or because things “actually” are that way in some metaphysical way if you really want to. But I think that is an irrelevant meaningless question/distinction, the kind that Marxism, as a philosophy, does away with.
ITT: What too much theory does to a mfer
I think the Kuhnian “normal science --> anomalies --> paradigm shift” model of scientific progress can be seen as a kind of dialectical process.
Honestly I’m somewhat critical of “paradigm shifts.” There is a bit of an obsession in academia when it comes to metaphysics, both in philosophy departments and physics departments, of academics trying to come up with “paradigm shifts.” Academics seem to have a natural tendency to find extraordinary explanations more interesting, and seem to have a strong bias against more banal explanations, always seeing them as dubious and questionable.
The result is that there is almost never an attempt to steel man the non-extraordinary interpretation before adopting the extraordinary one. “Paradigm shifts” are almost taken to be de facto correct, whereas someone who defends the old paradigm is often met with extreme hostility, painting them as an old outdated kook who just needs to die off so we can all accept the new mode of thinking.
The reality is that hardly any of the “paradigm shifts” in the last century and a half have actually been empirically necessary, and the old way of thinking has always been defensible. Physicists often create the false illusion that a paradigm shift is a necessity by falsely equating the physics with their metaphysics and then using the success of the physics to “prove” their metaphysics, equating anyone who doesn’t believe their metaphysics as equivalent to a science denier, but these things are indeed logically separable.
Take, for example special relativity, that supposedly “proves” space and time is relative because it empirically predicts that rods and clocks can deviate from one another. The physicist John Bell published a paper “How to Teach Special Relativity” pointing out that this only proves space and time is relative if we define space and time in terms of a metric corresponding to whatever any arbitrary rod and clock measures, because that metric is undeniably relative.
If we instead define space and time in terms of whatever a specific rod and clock measures, then we will have an absolute space and time metric. Deviations from that metric would then be interpreted as apparent effects, and thus there would be a distinction between real time and real space vs apparent time and apparent space. This would be wholly consistent with an absolute, Galilean space and time, while also being wholly consistent with the empirical predictions of special relativity.
Indeed, when Einstein introduced his special relativity in 1905, it actually made no new empirical predictions at all, because Lorentz had proposed a theory in 1904 which was mathematically equivalent and thus made all the same predictions, with the only difference being that Lorentz does not assume an invariant speed of light (which, despite common misconception, has never been measured, as it is not physically possible to measure the speed of light) with a preferred rest frame of the universe.
Einstein’s criticism of Lorentz’s theory was that he did not think such a preferred rest frame was sensible because there is no good reason to treat any particular frame as “preferred” over any others, and he developed special relativity, and late general relativity, on these premises. However, Einstein’s criticism turned out to be false, because to actually make GR consistent with our universe, you have to adopt specifically the Friedman solutions to Einstein’s field equations, and in the Friedman solutions, GR spontaneously gives rise to an empirically measurable rest frame of the universe known as cosmic time, and you can measure your motion relative to the rest of the universe by analyzing the cosmic dipole in the cosmic background radiation.
A similar thing is also true of quantum mechanics. Many physicists, like Niels Bohr, insisted that we must interpret it as a “paradigm shift” whereby particles have no real values until you look at them, then suddenly “collapse” down to a definite state. Later, you had Hugh Everett who went even further and claimed that we should stop believing that a single universe exists, but in fact there is an infinite multiverse with an infinite number of copies of you.
However, the physicist Dmitry Bloktinsiev had pointed out that you can just interpret quantum mechanics as a holistic form of statistical mechanics, whereby particles never spread out as waves, they have real values at all times, but that the waves are purely a description of their statistical dynamics mechanics and thus are only observable over an ensemble of systems. Hence, we see waves in experiments we run many many times over (like firing a single photon many many times over and accumulating statistics in the double-slit experiment forms a wave-like interference pattern), but we never see it in the individual case (the photon, in any individual case, is always found to exist in a single place, with a single trajectory).
Bloktinsiev made this argument in a 1950s paper and a 1960s book, although he never really rigorously formulated it. However, fairly recently in 2025, the physicist Jacob Barandes published a paper “The Stochastic-Quantum Correspondence” proving that quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent to a holistic statistical theory, the holism coming from history-dependence, what he calls non-Markovianity. This history-dependence means that the behavior of a system is a function over its whole statistical history, which directly leads to a breakdown in classical divisibility.
In some ways, this breakdown in classical divisibility is a “paradigm shift,” but far less radical than something like Copenhagen or Many Worlds. There is no empirical necessity to actually believe that particles do not have real values when you are not looking at them, that there are invisible infinite-dimensional waves, that these waves “collapse” when you look at them, or that there is a multiverse, or any of these exotic interpretations.
It is perfectly logically consistent to interpret quantum theory as just a form of holistic statistical mechanics, and so particles really are just particles that evolve in a way with real values at all times in the real world, but you just cannot know those values because the theory is stochastic and not deterministic, and all the deviations between classical and quantum mechanics arise solely from the lack of divisibility in quantum systems.
The “paradigm shifts” are always overblown and overstated. There is actually nothing logically inconsistent with interpreting reality in terms of just particles with well-defined positions at all times that evolve through absolute spacetime. That is logically and mathematically consistent with unmodified orthodox quantum theory and special relativity. The “paradigm shifts” are ultimately not necessary, but an intentional metaphysical choice. John Bell tried to point this out in his paper “On the Impossible Pilot Wave,” that, whether or not pilot wave theory is correct, the very fact it is even possible to formulate such a theory, even if the theory turns out to be wrong, disproves the idea that it is empirically necessary to adopt exotic interpretations of QM, like Copenhagen or Many Worlds.
You see these “paradigm shifts” in philosophy as well, like David Chalmers supposedly proving the “hard problem of consciousness,” but they do not steelman the simpler position either in this case, which is that of direct realism in which the problem is not derivable.
Dialectics, in the sense of being an analytical method, can be applied to any area of investigation, and can help understand the contrafictory relations within a system and their development. This does not mean that everything that is known must fit into a dialectical scehma, just that analyzing phenomena dialectically can give a greater understanding of their essense. It is in the analytical form a type of abstraction. You don’t need to put Newtons laws into a dialectical schema to use them, but you could use it to analyze interconnectedness.
That being said, there are plenty of things within physics that can be viewed as contradictions. Newtons third law, for example. Or lights dual nature as both particle and wave. Or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Or the contradiction between the concentration of energy and matter in the big bang against its dispersion in space and equalization of energy into flat heat.
But the question “is everything subject to thermodynamics” isn’t a really a question of diamat as an analytical method, but rather a question of metaphysics. Is the true essense of everything built up of contradictions and their development? Some would say yes, including several major marxist theoresticians like Mao, others might be skeptical of such a strong claim. But what is clear is that diamat is at least part of everything that makes up reality if one accepts diamats philosophical presuppositions at all, and which is proven through it’s apperance in science and nature, and that diamat as an analytical method is how humans can best understand this part of reality - this is true even if you don’t accept the strongest possible version of the claim.
I would also add that I think a hollistic analysis, focused on interconnection and development, is precisely what many sciences could use to develop, as modern science struggles with being to tied to a static and seperated metaphysics due to the currwnt historical context. Diamat is how one can conduct such an analysis.
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.
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.”
— David Bohm, “Wholeness and the Implicate Order”
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?
Dialectics can only change how we interpret the material, not the material itself. Its just an epistemology.
There are plenty of types of coevolution with predators and prey. The lifecycle of bacteria, fungi, worms, and viruses can elucidate a food web by showing where different parts of their maturation happen. So immune systems and virulence create a super structure in a sense.
There’s competition for binding for receptors in natural environments as far as biochemistry is concerned. Something about the sensitivity and number of receptors being a super structure.
But generally science has no obligation to make sense. The higgs field probably doesn’t exist in response to some other force in a sense that is readily attributes to Hegalian dynamics. The scientific method is a different way by which you can observe the way things happen.
Yes. There is no science in a vacuum.
As far as we know everything is dialectical.
It does mean there has to be something that isn’t, theoretically. Many people have spent their entire lives searching for it and who knows if they ended up finding it.
