Levels and Hierarchies

Marxist Theory on the Nature of Emergent Transitions

No-one can seriously doubt that Discrete Levels do indeed occur within Reality.

But, the Principle of Plurality (and along with it the idea of Reductionism), assume Causality to be both universally applicable and transparently evident. And, in addition, any produced Levels are transformed into merely situations of complexity-and-convenience, rather than marking where wholly creative, multi-factor and revolutionary conversions have taken place!

For, in alternatively doing the latter, it would have totally prohibited any strictly straight-forward, and always fully-revealable, sequence of causes, as being the means by which they came to fruition.

This tenet is absolutely critical!

For, such a transition, termed an Emergence, can never be directly or fully predicted from its immediate precursors, because it then will have been a never-occurred-before transition: it will have produced the wholly new.

And as I was able to establish some time ago, within complex systems of multiple, purely-chemical reactions, in my Theory of Truly Natural Selection, an extension of something similar to Darwin's ideas, but concerning non-living processes, something of what happens in these Emergences could, at least partially, have been revealed. For, in that work, something of the holist concept of mutually-affecting processes, was clearly illustrated, including the significance of both competing and co-operating processes, in the ultimate achievements of balances-with-dominances, also delivering persisting Stabilities, and even explaining the possibility of flips between exactly opposite outcomes.

So, even in such simplified cases, some idea of both the resilience of achieved Stabilities, and the true vastness of their possible crises and dissolutions, plus even the consequent re-establishment of new Stabilities - upon entirely different and wholly new bases.

A mix of pluralist eternal entities cannot really compare with a mutually-affecting mix of holist entities in the vastness of its possibilities!

Clearly, none of this is ever possible within a Pluralist conception of Reality, for from that logical viewpoint, all things are fixed and totally independent of one another. Indeed, such mixes can only ever be seen as complex aggregations of fixed entities or even immutable Laws, and hence, natural creative innovation becomes a mere complexity of pre-existing forms.

Only the Holist Stance can deliver real Emergences!

And, a successful Emergence will always deliver a wholly new, previously-unpredictable Level.

And, without a true philosophically holist grounding, such as from The Buddha's or Hegel's damning critique of Pluralist Formal Logic, the necessary approach to "Complexity" will be very different indeed.

For, without it, the rich and turbulent trajectory of an actual Emergence will never even be imagined.

Let me relate a series of findings from my Theory of Emergences, which will give some idea of what is involved.

Fire tornado

Stability & Emergence

• Reality always involves multiple factors.

• These factors act simultaneously, but in different directions.

• Chaos seems likely, but instead Turbulence is produced.

• Usually, this finally settles into a balance of opposites.

• And, also, displays a resultant overall dominant stable effect.

• We can call this state Stability, and it can persist for a very long time.

• But, though it can appear permanent, it never is!

• At some point, the involved factors will change in some way.

• The effect will be to cause a Crisis in the Stability.

• Usually it will be resolved by a re-establishment of balance.

• But, a series of such Crises can follow, with a final Collapse.

• The stability is finally totally dissociated, heading for Chaos.

• It descends first to a Nadir of Dissolution.

• But then, as initially, it begins to form relations into systems.

• These generally fail, one after the other, until one persists.

• And further such systems are achieved, and a new balance.

• The cycle is complete a new and different stability now exists.

This level-change is a complex process, and appears incomprehensible without a holist approach to Reality. And, as described above, it is the most general description - extracted from such occurrences at many vastly different Levels of reality - where they will appear extremely different in detail, while oft-conforming to the above-described trajectory.

For example, the first analysed versions were extracted from Michelet's History of the French Revolution, by Karl Marx. Here the contending forces acting were people representing the warring Classes of that prior State-in-Revolution!

So, its embodiment at all possible Levels, down to the Sub-Atomic, as well as up to Social Revolutions, will, of course, reveal enormous differences in Content, while displaying a similar overall trajectory!

It has been applied to Capitalist Economics in Marx's Das Kapital, and to Social Revolution in the Russian Revolution, but its application generally to the vital area of Science has yet to be undertaken comprehensively, as Marx himself had always intended.

And, this undertaking is not a mere further task for Marxists, it is absolutely crucial!

As a physicist, myself, I can see that not only does Science really need Dialectical Materialism, but Marxism crucially needs that extension to Science.

With 60 years in Revolutionary Politics, always also seeking the wherewithal to defeat the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory in physics, I never received what I required to attempt it.

It simply wasn't there!

But, it is now. 

The revolution starts here...

Do you want to participate?

Equilibrium

When nothing much is happening?

When postulating all Stabilities as temporary, and all real Qualitative change as emergent, to a lesser or greater extent, as I most certainly do, then the undoubted objective of obtaining Equilibrium in experiments, before ever taking any measurements, must surely require clarification!

First, what is going on in such situations, that initially prevents that Equilibrium, and what is happening in the Nirvana of it finally-being-achieved?

The scenario described is both that in the school chemistry lab, and that confronting all early scientists.

First, whatever were our prior actions, and about which reliable results are required, and having done everything that was necessary, nevertheless, any immediately taken measurements would still be totally useless!

Why?

The reason is that they would be different, not only to everyone else doing the same experiment, but even your own re-measurements taken immediately after the first!

You have to wait. 

Because the thing you are trying to measure is clearly made up of many parts which can have individual properties of their own. So, all your initial problems are because what is sought, isn't everywhere fully there yet!

In fact, it will only be there when all the unavoidable changes caused by our actions have communicated themselves throughout what it is that we are measuring - so that the many different parts settle down to a similar state, and that is not only never immediately achieved, it is also NEVER finally achieved either.

So, even after an initial thorough stirring-or-shaking, and a further wait, a single measurement can never be trusted as accurately describing the entity as a whole.

So, many re-measurements will be essential!

And, they will be similar, but not identical.

So, what is going on, and how do we finally get our required result?

All of these experiences demonstrate that our studied thing is NOT a single totally-homogeneous-entity: it is a collection of entities in close proximities to one another. And, we want them to "become-the-same", and they do gradually approach a common state. But, their modus operandi isn't simple: they are all vibrating, and affect one another, and only very slowly, does a sharing of what we are trying to measure, gradually approach what we might call Equilibrium!

So, we take a number of measurements - at the right time, and take the average of them all! 

Indeed, if all the parts, making up our overall entity, were separated, then they would all have different values for what we want. Indeed, we will ONLY get a single answer when they are all in causal-contact and have maximally shared the thing being measured,

It can only be a measurement of them all together.

The measurement achieved can even be something which is meaningless when applied to any single part in isolation, it can only be of the aggregation of all of them together: it will be of something like Temperature or Pressure!

Such measurements occur at a given Level.

So, if we go down to a lower level, they will vanish as such, so the causal descent through many such levels leaves behind prior quantitative measurements, and look, instead, into new ones. Yet, each level delivers a similar situation - always presenting something with key entities composed of lesser components.

And totally unfettered nature is even worse!

Indeed, to have any hope of extracting anything at all, we have to impose an Artificial Stability upon a situation, as well as carrying out all the above methods to get anything useable at all! We remove as many affecting factors as possible, and hold others constant, in order to be able to target a single and extractable relation. This is the same in practically all experiments.

We have to do this because Reality is Holist- a multi-factor World, with everything potentially affecting everything else. That is why nature evolves- producing the wholly New, like Life and even Consciousness.

Yet, we "hold it still"! We stop any natural change occurring. We never study the real Holist World, because we don't know how to!

We not only impose Stability, before we investigate, but actually believe that this reveals the Essences of Reality!

But, it doesn't!

So, to justify this fiction, we sanctify the Principle of Plurality, which has all active components independent of one another, and hence simply summing in various mixes to produce all the many different phenomena. And, this Pluralist Science aims only to reveal "Eternal Natural Laws",which alone are considered to deliver that Fictional World - fictional because Formal Relations, as such, can deliver absolutely nothing in the concrete world, for they are only abstractions of really-existing influences and effects.

And, real entities with their properties and influences must be the actual causes behind such purely formal descriptions.

Now, this aberrant path does not lead into mistaken subsequent actions, because the exact conditions achieved for extractionare always replicated for use! So, Technology is well served, while Explanatory Science is certainly not!

So is that elusive Equilibrium sought to reveal the defining Stability of Reality?

NO!

Indeed, though Natural Stabilities are very common, they actually hide the complex of mutually-affecting causal factors that always can find a temporary, if long-lasting, Stability in a balance of those contrasting and even opposing elements.

And, to Understand, rather than merely Describe and even Use, Explanatory Scientists, as distinct from Applying Technologists, must seek out the Causes for all the Qualities evident in our remarkably rich World - and they are NOT revealed in formal descriptions of Stabilities whether Natural or Arranged-For (in experiments and technology).

Special Issue 60: A New Basis

Special Issue 60

The End of Copenhagen & A Wholly New Basis

The current major crisis in Sub Atomic Physics is actually the clearest evidence of a much larger, and, therefore, more general set of definitely terminal dead-ends, in literally all intellectual disciplines, and primarily resident in both the philosophic and scientific underpinnings of them all.

Indeed, an apt metaphor, for the current state of Understanding, has to be that it is like a finally totally stunted-and-dying Bush, with every single, finally- produced twig permanently terminated by a seemingly totally, non-transcend-able impasse.

Apt because it is now an entity with absolutely nowhere to go, with literally everyone switching from twig to twig looking for a way out, but always finding none!

So, both the depth of the crises involved, and the fact that the producing-situation has been in place for some 2,500 years, without any significant improvement across the vast majority of the human population, also attests to the difficulties involved in making any sort of necessary and transforming change, which could even begin to address the almost endless impasses now terminating ALL attempts at real understanding.

It doesn’t mean, of course, that there are none. Just none on this bush (in this situation): the problems were set- in-place much too long ago, on a long-passed initial twig, which has now become the supporting trunk of the resulting thicket of dead-ends!

Yet, such a devastating opening to this paper was, I’m afraid, absolutely essential, for what is required is no mere Change-of-Course, but a truly Revolutionary Transfer to an entirely different tree, currently depended-upon by no-one, but nevertheless in sight, and available, if the leap across can be effected.

Don’t get me wrong! There will be some branches, upon the dying bush, that could be effectively transferred by grafting it onto the new Stock, but all their terminations will have to be savagely pruned, and the saveable graft properly cleaved-in and wedded to the new vigorous stock.

So, let us systematically reveal the diseases involved in arriving at this dire state, which were, surprisingly, initially significant advantages, but which gradually became liabilities, as the overall entity grew significantly in size and scope.

Indeed, all of them will be shown to have the same sort of disadvantages, actually never having the more-general- applicability, with which we mistakenly endowed them, and hence becoming increasingly debilitating features.

It has been a difficult trajectory, and really nothing like our usual assumption of a simple aggregation of ever more “understanding”, ultimately destined to explain absolutely everything.

For, definitely no-such-mechanism even existed prior to the first appearance of Mankind. Thinking, as such, was a human social invention, initially pragmatically assembled, via various arrived-at-means that “seemed to work”, but were always, at best, only pragmatic solutions, in particular contexts, and never ever general truths. Indeed, they couldn’t possibly be anything else!

In the several million years of the hominid line, and, of that, the only 200,000 years of Homo sapiens (humans), Philosophical thinking only really started around 2,500 years ago. And, for almost all of that prior history the Pragmatist tenet - “If it works, it is right!” was all we had.

So, the following series of papers has had to attempt to describe that trajectory of development in a very different way - NOT as some systematic erection, but instead as a series of always insufficient attempts, all of which, at crucial points, had to drastically rebuild its foundations in order to proceed further. As V, Gordon Childe always insisted - Man makes himself!

The “available alternative bush” mentioned earlier has to deal with dynamic reality, based upon Hegel’s Dialectics, but radically altered from a system which was limited to Human Thinking, to one transferred wholesale to a materialist basis, and hence applicable to all of concrete Reality too.

The project will reveal its efficacy (and its inadequacies) in its application to Sub Atomic Physics.

The Alliance of Toffs with Yobs

Lord Pearson of Rannoch, the former leader of Ukip, has been criticised for inviting far-right "activist" Tommy Robinson to the Palace of Westminster.

What fuels the rise of the far-right?

And where does it lead?

Listening to the Radio, or watching TV News, may indicate what is happening currently, in the still extant aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis - and by far and away the biggest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, yet no real reasons are ever given, or likely outcomes revealed.

Yet, the best indicators are very clearly available in History!

But, you have to focus on the final, dissociating crises of played-out, dying systems, as the once seemingly unassailable Ruling Classes desperately and violently struggled then, as they do now, to survive.

They were then, and are now, a tiny minority of the World's population, but they had then, and have now, both the power and the money to "run-the-show" their way. But, as that show begins to fall-apart beneath their well-shod feet, so the old performances now increasingly cease to enwrap their audiences. New ways and new alliances become imperative!

And, even the scarcely-effective organisations of the Working Class have to be emasculated and their leaders besmirched with invented lies!

Do you doubt this scenario?

Look around you!

As the Roman Empire began to crumble, the rich retired into well-defended and well-equipped Latifundia - walled enclaves, mirrored today by gated communities.

And, alliances with backward, prejudiced communities were, and still are, both fostered and financed to supply the paraphernalia, slogans, and easily-identified "targets" to be blamed for their difficulties!

What was the general solution for most Ruling Classes in the 1930s?

It was Fascism and War!

Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Japan and many other Ruling Classes not only established Fascism at home, but extended it vastly by conquest, in a truly World War!

Can you foresee a possible World War 3?

The inappropriate issues focussed upon by the Media (owned, of course, by the Ruling Class) must be cast aside!

The problem is Capitalism - an economic system which is dying - and the solution is Socialism!

We have to understand what is happening, and who are enemies are: the Rich are the instigators, but we must be ready for the Yobs, who they will recruit to attempt to destroy us! If they march in our streets, as they did in Cable Street in London in the 1930s, they must be defeated NOW as we defeated them then!

Tories OUT!

Socialism IN!

Organise at every level for the coming struggle! Be like the heroic Grenfell survivors - Organise and Fight Back!

Synchronicity? Google yourself a doppelgänger!

The 'real' James Schofield?

This is a little strange...

It seems I have a namesake. 

James Schofield is fairly common name. But Dr. James Schofield from New Zealand not only writes about philosophy and physics, but dialectics and holism too! I google these subjects often, and believe me, there isn't that much of interest out there, so this is a real surprise.

I don't really do coincidences. Maybe, just as I found James googling myself, so might James have found me and my work, some years ago, influencing his own research perhaps? 

I have no evidence for this particular theory, but maybe one day James will google himself again and find this post. If you are reading this James, please get in touch! No grudges! I'm reading your thesis now and it is fascinating, I think we have more in common than a name.

James Schofield.

A James Schofield that isn't me!

What to do with Stately Homes?

How can these 'country houses' be made to serve the People?

Currently, the media are overflowing with programmes on the buying and selling of antiques, which always seem to centre around the magnificent palaces of the very rich - either as venues for "Valuation Extravaganzas", or as valuable sources for Antique Dealers, turning unwanted heirlooms into cash, by returning them to those who can both appreciate and afford them!

"Because", we are informed, "these Stately Homes cost absolute fortunes to maintain", you know, "so the hard-pressed owners have grave difficulties in trying to keep their palaces in the state to which they have become accustomed!"

They even have to open their House and Estate to the paying public on special days to help to maintain their required standards.

And, the diverse sub plots, woven into these various celebrations of Grandeur, are purposely included to entrance and con the watchers and the visitors.

"This is what success can deliver for you!"

I lived for a decade within yards of a busy auctioneers, and quickly learned how they fitted in to an overall scheme. On the one hand, they were to extract unrealised treasures from their uninformed owners, at the lowest possible prices, while on the other, the object was to achieve the highest possible prices from those who could afford them, to further boost one "stately" home or another.

These programmes are among the commonest on TV, and even infer that you might be able to even do better than the emerging celebrities, who all seem to appear on a whole range of different offerings, but with the very same purposes.

It has become like the football pools of the past, when it is added to all the above, and to the increasing number of Betting Companies selling their wares over the Internet, the impression is projected that, "the next big winner could be you!"

I'm afraid not.

No.

Its all a necessary myth, so that you come to admire rather than loath the super rich.

But, what a colossal waste!

Such 20, 50 or even 100 room palaces sitting close to so many villages, could become The Property of The People, and be used as Schools, Hospitals, parts of a University, Clinics, Old Peoples' Retirement Homes, Social Centres, Research Centres, and all the rest.

And the Estate Grounds instead of serving a tiny already over-privileged family, could be Public or Country Parks and Sports Venues, or whatever the People need!

Philosophy Reviews and Criticism

SHAPE Reviews - taking on today's biggest philosophical and political thinkers... oh and Zizek too ;)

Propagating Space

How can a void have a structure? Maybe it isn't empty...

How can space be totally empty?

The inclusion of a Universal Substrate filling all-of-space immediately removes the obvious advantages of such being totally empty, but, it also does this simultaneously with the provision of a concrete means for propagations across "the supposed void" - causally explained, at long last.

Such contradictions occur regularly in Science, and, indeed, necessarily so in a sincere quest to understand Reality. And, they occur crucially, and most obviously, for the reasons that Hegel revealed some 200 years ago. Such Dichotomous Pairs of Contradictory Ideas occur because our initial definitions are always unavoidably inadequate in some way - the most likely being due to the omission of some essential premise, or alternatively some error in an included premise. [And, for this reason, the usual general assumptions of Plurality have been jettisoned here in favour of the more accurate stance of Holism]

But also, it is becoming clear, that the assumption of an Empty Universe greatly simplified our conceptions of what could possibly happen there.

For, as soon as there is NO Empty Space, disruptions or replacements locally of that now essential underlying Substrate, can, and apparently will, disrupt, deflect or even prohibit "straight-line" propagations.

And yet, all such contradictions are explained by Hegel's discrediting of Formal Reasoning, due to its pluralist stance, which explains everything in terms of fixed properties and Laws - so the possibility of something possessing alternative and even contradictory modes is totally prohibited by that stance.

But, as we have seen in the Theory of the Universal Substrate, subsets of its producing Units can exist in various alternative arrangements with very different properties: our flawed, initial conceptions may contain sufficient Objective Content to be eminently useful in given circumstances, but will always, in the end, prove to be insufficient!

The initial problem is therefore,

"How can conceived-to-be straight-line propagation occur, with something in the way?"

Now, answering this problem in terms of point sources and a necessary straight line route to a point recipient is impossible! But, that is a formally simplified version of a real occurrence.

The likelihood is that a host of propagations will be initiated from many different positions, so some will avoid the obstructions and the effect upon the odd diversions, by the rest, will not be considered to affect it thereafter.

But, remember, these Substrate Pavings can be temporarily dissociated into showers of individuals units, which form, temporarily-at-least, directed flows, which, as soon as they can, will be absorbed back into paving-based propagations thereafter.

Perhaps this is similar to turbulence in a gas? https://gdtl.osu.edu

It would seem necessary to have a propagated signal briefly transforming itself into a mode which collectively maintains a direction through such disturbances. You can see why Photons are possible, BUT are only one of several modes!

ASIDE: Watching a lecture by Erik Verlinde, the complexities of his purely Formal means of dealing with all the phenomena at the Sub Atomic Level was evidently unavoidable due to the pluralist and idealist stance involved.

Every mode change in my way of dealing with things, unavoidably involved yet another formal method, in his way of thinking. But, what he was doing was NOT Physics, it was Mathematics, and they are NOT the same thing at all!

To promote purely formal descriptions into causes is Idealism: it makes simplified abstractions, fitted-up-to by purely formal relations, as the causes of Reality. Such theorists are seduced by the almost limitless extent of Pure Forms in Ideality, so they easily forget that Forms are never causes, always consequences.

And, of course, the original power of such forms, enabling the construction of a consistent and developable discipline, Mathematics, only works within Stabilities: any situation involving developmental changes cannot be encapsulated by such methods.

Indeed, rather than a pluralist conception, which can only ever deliver complication, there is the holist alternative, which can, and indeed must, deliver the intrinsic developments that quite evidently have led time-after-time to the entirely new emerging! Can Lego-like plurality deliver Life and Human Consciousness? Of course it can't!

Out of Hegel's insistence that true qualitative change simply must be included in all reasoning, arose the possibility of it also including the natural development of Reality. And, with the wholesale transfer of his Dialectics to a materialist basis by Marx, the possibility of Science extending its reach beyond the sole study of Stabilities, finally became possible. Indeed, Darwin's revolutionary revelation of Evolution in Living Things naturally meant that there must have been major developments in what had given rise to Life - the material World itself evolves. Can Mathematics deal with that?

No.

A Muse upon Halton Arp's Intrinsic Redshift

Halton Arp

Halton Arp was a brilliant Astronomer, whose observations increasingly challenged the consensus theories in Cosmology. But, he more or less stood alone, and the bans on his continuing to have access to the world's greatest telescopes, and the difficulty in getting his interpretations of published observations themselves being accepted for publication, has severely constrained the propagation of those conclusions. And, as the means to obtain the best data are now almost totally restricted to multi-million dollar devices such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider, such exclusions are ever easier to institute.

The defence of past positions becomes ever easier, and genuine counter-proposals are easily shut out by peer review, and don't get effectively aired.

Now, neither I, nor anyone else, is in a position to gainsay or agree with Arp, for that would certainly at least involve a directed observational undertaking to prove or disprove his conclusions. But, Arp has found such undertakings impossible to arrange, as have many others! Yet, if only some of Arp's conclusions are true, they would be revolutionary.

Arp made his name with his bestseller - Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (1966), which led to him noticing a whole series of cases, which seemed to suggest intimate associations between mature galaxies, and what seemed to be "nearby pairs of dwarf galaxies" in which their redshifts in their spectra made nonsense of such an association.  For, they alone placed the pairs of galaxies at a vastly different distances from the observer than the supposed "Parent Galaxy" - but only if the usual cause of red shifting was the correct one, due entirely to the speed of movement away from us.

Arp could suggest an alternative cause, which he termed the Intrinsic Redshift, which was not only due to the age of the dwarf galaxies or quasars, but also varied in a quantized way, with time and distance from their birthplaces! His evidence, as he has presented it, is persuading, mainly because of the seeming associations with a "parent Galaxy". For, these pairs appeared to be equidistant on either side of the Parent, and always positioned upon its minor axis!

Having noticed this many times, Arp began to purposely seek them out, and remarkably found more than single pairs involved. In fact, further pairs on the same minor axes were found, and their Red Shifts decreased with distance from the parent - NOT continuously, but in a quantised pattern. Clearly though, directed searches for certain configurations among billions of Galaxies, might turn out to present a "selected-out false generality".

But clearly, if the correct scheme was devised and undertaken, such remarkable chance conformities would be easily revealed!

Of course, if Arp were right, the whole of the current Cosmological Theory, including the Big Bang and the age of the universe, would be undermined, and new answers required literally everywhere. And Arp was aware of these difficulties, and attempted his own alternatives to the usual Big Bang scenario. Yet, literally thousands of reputations and multitudinous published papers have been produced, all over the World, by prestigious and eminent scientists. Many would have a great deal to lose if he were right!

Now, the writer of this paper, a physicist, also has an axe to grind, concerned with the necessary presence throughout the Universe of a totally undetectable Substrate, which is both affecting-of, and affected-by entities and processes taking place within it.

This too seems a very way-out suggestion, except that unlike James Clerk Maxwell's description of the then universally believed-in Ether, the undetectable units of such a substrate have been theoretically devised involving only known Elementary Particles, and with only this single inclusion, every single one of the anomalies of the Double Slit Experiments have been physically explained. In addition, both the Propagation of Electromagnetic Energy through so-called "Empty Space" as also been cracked, as have the physical extension of active fields in the same situations.

Now this research is still ongoing, but it too affects everything currently supposed to occur in Empty Space, due to the densities of the Universal Substrate in different circumstances, as they also do Arp's theories. And another potential resonance occurs with the Origin of Matter, in both the new theories it comes from the pre-existing Substrate.

Clearly, both theories might be buried by the necessary research, but if they are wrong, so be it!

However, there is obviously a great deal wrong with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, as well as the consequent theories of the Cosmos, and such research might well rid us of those too!