pcalau12i

Marx’s specific model is not fully explanatory, no, I would agree with that. But I don’t get why you’re painting this as an attack on dialectical materialism, because dialectical materialism is not a model of history. If you supplemented Marx’s model, improved upon it and added more detail, this would still be within the framework of dialectical materialism, or else it’s not worth taking seriously. You would still need to stick to a material analysis, and it’s impossible to speak on things without categorizing them, so you would still need to introduce labels for categories to talk about, i.e. “classes,” and those would still need to be rooted in material reality.

I have seen many analyses that were fairly interesting that were not explicit to Marx. For example, I recall one author argued that people who engage largely in domestic work, such as stay-at-home wives, don’t entirely have the same relations to production as those who work under an employer, and so they should be treated as their own class, meaning the differences in their labor and their interests deserve their own analysis, and they further argued that the “domestic economy” in general deserves much more study, since most Marxian texts only tend to focus on the wage labor economy, and older ones with the peasant economy, part of this being due to the fact that domestic labor isn’t paid and therefore tends to not be tracked.

Maybe you agree with it, maybe you don’t, but I did think it was interesting thing to consider. They were arguing precisely what you siad: in factor of “extra complications and nuances” rather than just ignoring domestic work or lumping domestic laborers into the same category as wage laborers and thus treating them as “the same,” which misses the nuance between them. But, they weren’t just simply arguing for extra complications a nuances for their own sake, but arguing for it to improve upon and construct a more detailed material analysis.

That is just one example I recall prominently from the top of my head, but it’s meant to illustrate a simple point. I will take your “extra complications and nuances” as something worthy of consideration if, and only if, it is still following a dialectical materialist analysis. There are tons of authors, like Bernardo Kastrup, who tries to introduce “extra complications and nuances” into physics, but his complications are all idealist mumbo jumbo incoherent voodoo nonsense, so he’s not worth taking seriously.

Additions to physics, as well as additions to historical materialist analysis, should not be idealist nonsense and should still be compatible with dialectical materialism in nature or they are not worth considering.

Furthermore, Bell-type experiments, which are a part of the broader quantum theory, display quantum entanglement such that measuring one half of the experiment decides the outcome of the other.

That is just non-locality. It also doesn’t “decide the outcome” of the other. It is more complicated than that. Bell’s theorem is about a locally stochastic theory having to obey Reichenbachian factorization, which is the idea that a joint probability distribution between two objects should be factorizable if you condition on a common cause in their backwards light cone where they locally interacted. If you assume this, it places certain statistical bounds on what results you can expect, which is broken in practice.

If you interpret quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory without altering its mathematics, then the outcomes are just random so nothing determines them by definition, but what one observer does in their lab does affect the kind of statistical correlations they would expect to find with another person’s lab if they later compare results. In a deterministic model that does add something, like Bohmian mechanics, this model is also contextual, so the deterministic trajectories depend upon the full experimental context. Ultimately, the particle’s trajectory is still ultimately determined by its initial state, but the observer changing the configuration of the measurement devices while the particle is mid-flight does alter the physical context of the experiment and thus can alter those trajectories.

To be clear, Bernard does not promote skepticism about reality or its objectivity. But he argues convincingly that the evidence is inconsistent with materialism.

If you presented him accurately then he undeniably does. You cannot claim X then turn around saying you’re not claiming X. If there are no facts about things until you look at them then there is no objectivity. That is literally solipsism.

Whether you agree with Bernard is immaterial (pun intended). The larger point here is that reasonable people can disagree with materialism giving the probabilistic, relational, and epistemologically problematic nature of subatomic particles.

I don’t see what is non-materialistic about statistics. One of the most famous and influential materialists in history, Friedrich Engels, heavily criticized causality in his writings, viewing cause-and-effect as an abstraction such that the same system could be described in a different context where what is considered the cause and what is considered the effect swap places. The physicist Dmitry Blokhintsev, the man who invented the concept of the graviton, was personally inspired by Engels’ writings and even cited this in a paper he wrote criticizing the Copenhagenists for thinking lack of “Laplacian determinism” as he called it implies a contradiction with materialism, saying that materialist of his school had already rejected Laplacian determinism since the 1800s.

Again, the arguments you’re making have nothing to do with quantum mechanics at all. If they have literally no relevance to quantum mechanics, then it makes no sense to try and use quantum mechanics as an argument in your favor. One can also imagine existing in a universe where the laws of physics are classical without quantum mechanics at all, but systems still undergo fundamentally random perturbations. These are classical perturbations which cannot violate Bell inequalities, but would still disallow you from tracking the definite states of particles and they could only be tracked with a vector in configuration space that is a linear combination of basis states.

If one wants to argue that randomness somehow contradicts with materialism, then the same argument could be made in that universe, and so the argument must have nothing to do with quantum mechanics.

These insights obviously conflict with our understanding of materialism! We cannot simply presume the truth of materialism because we find it more intuitive. At best, scientists can justify their assumption of materialism on practical grounds.

Sagan’s razor. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” “Intuitive” refers to things which are blatantly obvious and self-evident and are supported by all of our observations. To deny it thus requires a much greater burden of evidence. If you want to claim everything we perceive is a lie, that we all live inside of a grand illusion and reality actually works fundamentally differently than to what we perceive, then this is, indeed, quite an extraordinary claim, and I am simply going to dismiss it unless you can provide extraordinary evidence for it.

Yet, no extraordinary evidence is ever presented. Only vague loose philosophical arguments. That is just not convincing to me. The reality is that we already know you can fit the predictions of special relativity and quantum mechanics to simple theories point particles moving deterministically in 3D space with well-defined values at all times evolving in an absolute space and time. The point is, again, not that we should necessarily believe such a model, but the fact we know such models can be constructed disproves any claim that we cannot interpret quantum mechanics as a realist theory. If you don’t add anything to it, you have to interpret it as a stochastic theory, but I have no issue with statistics. My issue only arises when people claim a system described by a statistical distribution has “no fact” about it in the real world.

That is just mysticism not backed by anything.

I take a very “conservative” approach to philosophy. If you are going to introduce some brand new world-shattering “paradigm shift” metaphysics, then I am going to be your biggest skeptic. I will want you to demonstrate that this is a necessity, either a logical or empirical necessity, such that all more trivial ways to conceive of the world have been exhausted.

Our belief in objective reality and object permanence isn’t just something we farted out one day for fun because we have an “unreasonable bias.” People believe these things because they fit our day-to-day self-evident empirical observations and do a great job to make sense of things. If you are going to throw them out, you therefore better have a damned good reason, rather than just complaining that we’re being “biased” based on our “intuition.”

That’s just a cop-out.

2/2

You may have good arguments for one camp within this discussion (e.g., sophisticated materialism) but to dismiss the philosophical implications outright prima facie indicates either a lack of familiarity with the philosophy of physics or perhaps a dismissal of metaphysics as a fruitful enterprise.

No, it reflects something called intellectual honesty. It is always possible for two different groups of people, given the same predictive body of mathematics, to draw different metaphysical conclusions from them. The idea that the mathematics necessitate someone’s particular metaphysics is just intellectual dishonesty pushed by people with bizarre views who can’t defend them on any other grounds other than to dishonestly pretend that the mathematics somehow proves them.

Call this “strong objectivity”. In contrast, Bernard d’Espagnat, theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, argues against materialism on the grounds that standard quantum mechanics is only “weakly objective”. (See his book, “On Physics and Philosophy”.) Although our observations are intersubjectively valid, quantum mechanics is predictive rather than descriptive: it does not describe the world as consisting of mind-independent entities that have determinate properties before they are observed/measured.

This is blatantly obviously his personal metaphysical interpretation which is in no way necessitated from the mathematics. I can just look at the exact same body of mathematics and interpret it as describing an objective but stochastic world. Even in a purely classical world, but one which evolves through random perturbations, we would find that we cannot track the definite states of objects at a given time. We could thus only track an evolving probability distribution. But it is understood, typically, that when it comes to probability, that there is an underlying configuration of the system in the real world, but we just do not know which one it is.

To deny this is to deny object permanence. These properties are not invisible, they are directly observable. We just happen to not be observing them in the moment, but they still possess observable properties and thus are observable under a counterfactually conceived circumstance. This is the basis of object permanence, that we don’t reject the existence of observable things just because we are not observing them in the precise moment, as long as they can be observed under a counterfactual.

There is no fact of the matter concerning the state of the system before we measure it.

This is to devolve into crackpot solipsism. Humans are made out of particles. If particles have no fact of the matter about them until you look, then other humans also have no fact about them either before you look. This was Schrodinger’s point about his “cat” thought experiment. He was trying to point out that your beliefs about fundamental particles cannot be confined to fundamental particles, that they necessarily also imply things about macroscopic objects as well, like cats, or other people.

There is, again, literally nothing in the theory that forces you to accept this premise. The delusion goes back to John von Neumann who was a brilliant mathematician but also a crackpot who originated the “consciousness causes collapse” interpretation of quantum mechanics and was a major advocate for starting a WW3 nuclear holocaust. In one of his books on the mathematics of quantum mechanics, he tries to offer a mathematical “proof” that objective reality doesn’t exist, by showing that, if quantum mechanics is just a stochastic theory, then it should follow certain statistical laws, and shows that it violates those laws.

However, John Bell would later debunk von Neumann’s “proof” in his own response paper, published at the same time he published his famous theorem. Since von Neumann was a brilliant mathematician, there were no mathematical flaws in his “proof,” and so it had a major impact and caused many physicists to start agreeing with von Neumann’s mysticism. But Bell pointed out that the issue is not in the mathematics, but the premises. von Neumann’s assumptions about statistics are not just rules underlying pure statistics, but also include physical assumptions as well, specifically he adopted an assumption of additivity which only makes sense if the underlying physics are classical. If the underlying physics are not classical, then there is no reason for such an assumption to hold.

All von Neumann really proved was that the underlying statistical dynamics cannot be governed by classical physics. This is why Bell also published his other paper in the same year published his paper in response to the EPR paper as well, showing that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen’s beliefs that the underlying physics can be reduced to a classical stochastic theory are false. These physicists with crackpot beliefs love to present a false dichotomy where the only two possibilities are (1) quantum mechanics is a classically stochastic theory or (2) objective reality doesn’t exist. What Bell was trying to argue was that quantum mechanics is a non-classically stochastic theory.

What is “non-classical” about it is debatable, but the most trivial answer which was the one Bell identified is that it is simply not a local theory. In the modern day literature, this non-locality is sometimes more accurately referred to as contextuality. The stochastic dynamics simply depend upon the full experimental context. For example, consider the Elitzur-Vaidman experiment: https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9305002

This experiment proves that the mere presence or absence of a barrier alters the statistical behavior of a photon which never interacts with the barrier, because the photon’s stochastic evolution depends upon the entire experimental context, not just what it directly interacts with at the moment. This is why von Neumann’s additivity assumption does not hold. It assumes that if we only consider the photon that passed through path A while B is blocked, and path B while A is blocked, then the statistics of the photons passing through A or B when neither is blocked should just be Pr(A)+Pr(B). But, as shown from the Elitzur-Vaidman setup, this is obviously not the case, because the photon, even in the individual case, is influenced by the presence or absence of a barrier it does not interact with, so even if a photon takes path A, if there is no barrier on path B, it can influence its statistical behavior differently than if a barrier were present. You therefore cannot meaningfully add together Pr(A_barrier)+Pr(B_barrier) and expect it to yield Pr(A_nobarrier)+Pr(B_nobarrier). They are not the same.

But, despite von Neumann’s proof being debunked by Bell, these same crackpots in physics academia took Bell’s theorem and started to run around claiming Bell’s new theorem is proof objective reality doesn’t exist, even though Bell never claimed that. Bell was literally a major proponent of realist models, publishing a paper trying to develop Bohm’s pilot wave theory, as well as published a stochastic model that could reproduce quantum field theory. Non-locality isn’t the only option. It’s just the simplest and most intuitive one where all the supposed “paradoxes” disappear in a puff of smoke when you accept that it’s just a contextual stochastic theory. However, there have been arguments made to drop other assumptions, like temporality rather than locality, based on the Two-State Vector Formalism. I am not a fan of non-temporality but I still respect such a position way better than denying objective reality even exists.

1/2

It really does not. Physics academia is just filled with crackpot mystics. I like to call them the metaphysical-physicists, the physicists who do not just immerse their mind in practical work but start talking metaphysics.

In 1964, the physicist John Bell proved that if you assume (1) that objective reality exists, (2) quantum mechanics is correct, and (3) special relativity is correct, then you run into a contradiction, and so one of the assumptions must be wrong. Deranged physicists in academia concluded #1 one is wrong and started to promote the crackpot mystical views that objective reality doesn’t actually exist. Like 90% of the quantum mysticism you see these does not originate from non-physicists like Deepak Chopra but from actual PhD physicists.

This is, at least, the story the mystics like to tell, that Bell’s theorem “proved” there is no objective reality. But this is a historical falsification, because if you actually check the historical record, you find that physicists in academia started to come to the “consensus” that objective reality isn’t real back in the 1927 Solvay conference, decades before John Bell ever published his theorem, and many more decades before it was ever confirmed in experiment, with Albert Einstein pretty much the last major holdout criticizing this turn of events, once asking Abraham Pais, “do you really believe that the moon doesn’t exist when you’re not looking at it?”

They already decided it doesn’t exist before they had any theorem or any empirical evidence that the theorem was correct. Bell’s theorem genuinely has nothing to do with this turn of events.

What is even more absurd is that we have known since the day special relativity was introduced in 1905 that it is not even necessary to make the right predictions of special relativity. Lorentz had proposed a theory in 1904 which is mathematically equivalent to special relativity without special relativity, and hence we know you can drop #3 without actually dropping the empirical predictions of #3. There is zero empirical necessity for premise #3.

Metaphysical-physicists love historical falsification. They make up this completely bologna narrative that we should accept the truth of special relativity because “it is the most tested theory in the history of physics,” but the statement is nonsensical, because it is mathematically equivalent to Lorentz’s theory. Hence, every “test” for special relativity is also a test of Lorentz’s theory.

You see this dishonest line of argumentation pushed a lot by the metaphysical-physicist crowd. They will push the most absurd metaphysics you can imagine that is entirely incoherent and when you say you don’t agree with that, they accuse you of denying the science because it is “well-tested.” But none of their crackpot metaphysics has been tested at all. There is no experiment you can conduct that proves a particle doesn’t have a definite value when you are not looking at it. This is just a delusion.

They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn’t have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.

Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined “laws” regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists’ armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the “utils” of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.

With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.

The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren’t really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it’s impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an “open society” operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.

As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.

You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it “word salad” when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.

Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means “no hierarchy,” like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren’t even “no hierarchy” they are “no unjustified hierarchy.”

The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.

All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.

It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It’s impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don’t want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.

Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don’t obey basic rules.

It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command (“hierarchy”), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to “bust up” something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.

Of course, anarchists don’t mind, they will say, “who cares about rockets? They’re not important.” It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won’t even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don’t even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don’t even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a “hospital small business” ran out of someone’s garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.