Issue 71 of SHAPE Journal: Cycles II

 Issue 71 of SHAPE Journal

Preface: The Beginnings of Holistic Dialectics in Science

With the latest Publication in SHAPE Journal, Jim Schofield is finally embarking, after 12 years of intensive theoretical and philosophical research, upon a now-possible, and clearly-transformational and definitely-essential Development in the Sciences. 

For, though the foundational bases were originally laid down by Karl Marx in the 19th century, Marx, as both a historian and a philosopher, was rightly-and-unavoidably pre-occupied, with the crucial elements of  a Qualitatively Developing History, along with the fact that the essential bases, for its understanding, were only present, in an observable-and-studiable way, via Rare Revolutionary Interludes, which alone clearly revealed the Actual Engines of all significant change, within their observable tempos of both Demolishing-and-Creating of Societies.

Indeed, it was only in a detailed study of such Revolutions that both the Maintenance of a persisting social system, and the Creation of a Wholly New society, could be revealed and addressed. And, hence an essential break from the previous universal domination of The Principle of Plurality in all of the Intellectual Disciplines of Mankind!

But, incredibly-slowly, the debilitating flaws in the Pluralist Stance, though successfully avoided within Technology, were beginning to be revealed in The Explanatory Disciplines, following the partial break through in Philosophy by Hegel.

But within that most basic Science, Physics, the problems caused by Plurality, led to a seemingly insoluble Crisis, between the Theorists, on the one hand, and their indispensible Technologists, on the other, who both erected all their Experimental set-ups, AND then delivered the necessary means to actually use their findings in Production too. The never-questioned links between all of these was undoubtedly Plurality - because of its technical embodiment, the universally lauded Mathematics!

And this had to be addressed FIRST to get all sides OFF the cause and apparent "only-solution" of their problems!

So, this was the first major task undertaken by philosopher Jim Schofield, in his damning Critique not only of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, but also of all of the various mistaken contributing Parties in the Crisis.

They were all indissolubly wedded to Plurality.

This Critique was Finally completed and published (as such) in 2020!

But, the more significant, and absolutely essential Dialectical Corrections within the Assumptions and Methods of  The Sciences, following Marx's treatment of Capitalist Economics had to be the same Transforming Revolution applied to the Sciences, and, of course, primarily in Physics first-of-all. It, most certainly, will be a Major Undertaking, affecting the whole of Physics, and, thereafter, all of the other Sciences, which defer to Physics as supplying their most basic Content.

The Problem, as was made clear in the criticisms of Plurality, was in its assumption of all Causality being entirely without Qualitative Changes, for they can mever emerge from any strictly pluralist Laws.

Indeed, the only real way, to import such changes, is via the alternative to Plurality, namely Holism, and in the Dialectical Version of it established by Karl Marx.

So, at this very early stage, the task, had to be, to deal with both Stability and Qualitative Changes in Reality, and consequently, and correctly,  in Causality too! The Key area turns out to be in Constantly Repeated Processes!

For, instead of constantly recurring "random processes" delivering a thermodynamic, maintained, minimum energy Stability, that state is usually a Balanced, Active Stability - achieved solely within that system, by the effects of constantly repeated, though totally-contained selective elimination processes - changing the set of contained process's relative abundences, and hence the overall effects of multiple, simultaneous processes involved.

For Such Systems can exist as Seemingly Permanently Self-maintaining Stable Systems, with greatly extended periods of Stability. While these actually, via a rare-but-inevitable avalanche of externally-initiated minor changes that though they are normally offset by others, acting in the opposite direction, as such maintain the Balance, Though sometimes, much more rarely they precipitate unstoppable changes throughout the Whole System, and cause a total collapse!

Thus the whole belief System, based upon Plurality, has to be replaced by something better: and just as it took Marx many decades to dismantle and replace Plurality in Economics with a newly constructed Dialectically Holist alternative, the same sort of comprehensive task is necessary in the Sciences too.

Circles into Helices into Spirals begins this process by looking at these repeating structures and the roles they might play in both the maintenance of periods of stability and those of profound change. 

Circles into Helices into Spirals

The Evolution of Circular Processes

Cycle I

The realisation of a seemingly-stable Cycle of Processes, initially and necessarily (in order to even begin to understand it fully), must always assume that it will continue-as-it-is, perpetually.

Thereafter, we assume a complete independance of the System from its Natural Context, detertmined solely by its own internal contents alone, just as we might for a wheel on a trolley, or even a precision cog in an expensive Swiss watch, with its century-lasting jewelled-mountings.

But while that view may deliver an understandable and useful approximation, it is most certainly NOT the permanent, on-going Truth: for, actually, absolutely all contexts, whether external or contained, will most certainly change over time, and will both deleterously and even advantageously affect the normal functionings of any such system - and particularly those which continue to repeat incessantly in a dynamic context.

The Swiss watch is a brilliantly conceived-of exception (although even Swiss watches break eventually)! For overtime, in self-developing Nature, things don’t progress rationally towards an intended objective, but instead can only find a consequent Development via undirected Variation. Thus, all contexts will change enough to alter any contained process: so, such a system will be likely to change its performance, due to variations in its determining context, which are likely to contribute to its subsequent decline, though occasionally alternatively instead to its growth and even its consequent range of significant Effects, instead of those solely determined by any internal deterioration.

Significantly, with multiple contributing causes to such a rotation, other changes might even cause positive modifications to emerge in the movement’s own initial causes, and hence re-direct things in a wholly New Way. To always be aware of this constitutes the Holist Approach!

And always considering Causality in this recursive way significantly breaks away from the usual truncated approach we see in most science and technology (the approach that built that Swiss watch), which purposely constrains contexts so that they never drift away from what is considered optimum - the Pluralist Way!

Indeed, in considering any such system, we must, in addition to internal changes, also consider what significant-but-not-terminating external changes will cause to happen in its subsequent performance. And by far the most significant external Effects, will be those that actually move the whole local context off from its initially conducive starting point, which, in a subsequent on-going, wider, containing context, will change a Cycle into a Helix (like a constant diameter Spring).

While another very different external change might have a significant effect upon the speed of rotation: thereby, if on-going, changing the fixed diameter of the previous Cycle, into a Spiral - either shrinking into an ever smaller Spiralic System, with decreasing energy, or one expanding into an ever growing spiral, with increasing energy.

And, of course, such changes would be unlikely to be limited to these very simple cases, The Systems we are concerned with abosolutely never act within otherwise stable situations: and though the most significant accompanying and consequent extra changes will be also related to other, as yet unconsidered, lesser driving changes, and even these themselves will have been caused by external changes that were also the initial reasons for already-considered, more obvious changes.

In addition, changes in such Systems will also happen in both directions, as natural systems are never mechanical, as in a watch or machine. Indeed, some on-going changes will certainly lead to terminations or even ultimately elicit wholly new behaviours.

These forms when they occur in a Living Economic Structure, for example, will occasionally lead to Total Collapse and even Revolutions!

Now, the highly constrained version of The Natural World we understand - because of is unavoidable transportation into a more reliable, but-strictly-Pluralist World - will always, if so adequarely controlled, deliver the expexted results achieveable via Mathematical Equations - for Mathematics is a legitimate Pluralist Discipline: it will validly deliver equations that fit!

But no such equations are available for Reality-as-is (without the pluralising straight-jacket we impose). And Holism cannot ever be encapsulated within any such equations - the Fixed Law we uses, indeed, mechanistic fixed relations, involved in such equations of Plurality, are wholly illegitimate in The Real World as it is!

For reality behaves holistically, things profoundly affecting one another over time, and natrual phenomena never exist in perfect isolation - and its changes are therefore Qualitative, rather than being Fixed and Quantitative, as everything is rendered in Plurality. The “laws” involved in Holism regard quality, and hence always changing and even transforming into other quite different Laws as contexts change.

So all the substitutions and manipulations of Algebra as essential in Pluralist Science, are illigitimate in the Holist Real World. Literally NONE of the essential dynamic holistic Laws are even considered currently, which is why Karl Marx, in attempting to explain historical development holistically, spent his whole Life tackling an explanation of Capitalist Economics, in his master work Das Kapital.

And, as should be no surprise to anyone appreciating the stance of the writer of this paper, there is as yet NO Dialectical Alternative in any of the Sciences - least of all all my key specialisms, Physics, Philosophy and Mathematics itself.

Indeed, even in the absolutely vital areas of Sub Atomic Physics and Cosmology, Plurality still Rules, but it is certainly not OK!

POSTSCRIPT:

Though this researcher, requiring a powerful Rationality within his core specialsms, has begun to tackle some of the key questions. But though demanded in other Major

Disciplines, he has been forced to enter the underlying Bases, only clearly available in Philosophy.

For, if positioned deep within Reality-as-is, and within its most demanding areas, the usual pluraist get-outs are legion and appear as the only known way to deal with understanding reliably.

And as will have become obvious at the start of this paper, as soon as holist alternatives are undertaken, the number of available options increases rapidly, and the study seems to be “spiralling out of control” in multiple different directions, with NO priority Path to make the task not only easier, but even possible!

Yet Reality itself, though containing ALL these diversions, does NOT follow them all at once! So, what is it that correctly limits its route?

In other words what Holistic Stabilities, though always temporary, are sufficient and long-lasting enough to enable initial steps to be made, before a general cataclym terminates a meaningful analysis?

We have to begin to understand Holistic Stabilities!

Now, interestingly, i have a very wide range of interests, and it has been some of these which enabled my first successful steps ino real Holist development! Indeed, it was within a deep venture into pre-Life Evolution of organic processes in the Sea. It was an ideal place to choose because, with a planet-wide connected System of Oceans, and spinning Earth recieving Day/Night differences in radiation, along with a seasonally varying weather system, as well as planet-wide circulations of water, via rain, rivers and ocean currents, not to mention more or less constant and differing contents carried by those rivers from very different land areas, and even their transformation by volcanism - and with the Earth’s tilt, varying Seasons!

For, these considerations immediately slowed down such Global Effects, delivering contrasting long periods with more limited Stabilities, and also enabled simpler scenarios with time-limits, therefore making available reasonably-long investigateable stabilities, as well as regular major change-overs to different Stabilities - the possibility space for Evolution.

This paper is taken from the latest issue of SHAPE Journal by Jim Schofield, entitled Cycles II.

Issue 71 of SHAPE Journal is the second instalment in a collection of essays by philosopher Jim Schofield on the importance of studying cycles. In this collection the essays themselves are cyclic, returning to themes in a series of iterations, attempting to home in on their importance in natural systems, evolution and in the Dialectical method itself.

You can read the first part here.

Intellectualism and Power

The supposed alternatives in tackling the Ruling Class in a Class Society

The problem, as it is seen by the participants from both sides of the Class Division in Society, arises primarily from the seeming impossibility of ever replacing the currently highly complex and increasingly global System of Capital. For, on one side it appears that way, for the dramatic losses that would be unavoidably suffered by those, who currently significantly benefit from their privileges under that System.  And also, on the other side, by the great majority, who see any significant wholesale transformation, first, as being totally impossible to even conceive of, and, thereafter, to implement. For, even the best of them have the worrying examples of Two World Wars (just concerned with which kind of Capitalists get to Rule), and then by the Long Cold War and innumerable Hot Wars aimed at either reversing the already revolutionary transformed states, or preventing actual social revolutions, in a whole series of different countries in crisis throughout the 20th century.

Both of these responses arise understandably from the immensity of such tasks! For they see Revolutions as Planned Operations, which really are always impossible, though planned Coups d'état by already powerful minorities are always possible.

For, NO Revolution is ever really planned!

The Revolutions that naturally occur always arise out of increasingly ever bigger Crises, wherein the unavoidable contradictions within any System, at some point, became both insurmountable, and naturally head for the Total Dissolution of the System.

Now, normally, the necessary transformations that make these systemic dissolutions unavoidable, also frequently result in consequent Dark Ages, which can last for long periods of time, but nevertheless, always ultimately generate the necessary solutions, for a recovery upon a wholly New Basis.

In the 19th century this historical Dynamic was uncovered by Karl Marx, who using the Dialectics of the Idealist philosopher Hegel, while studying significant and well-recorded Social Revolutions of the past, in great detail, and managed to see the Changing Dynamics involved, which prior Pluralist (Fixed-Law) Reasoning, had, in the past, made understanding such Qualitative Changes totally inconceivable!

Thereafter, such Marxists - as Marx's followers were termed - though they couldn't ever arrange for such a Revolution to happen themselves, could indeed monitor the naturally occurring inevitable series of Crises, and knew exactly when to intervene, to affect their possible individual outcomes with certain contained Phases.

But in a System like Global Capitalism, Major Crises occur, on average, every 4 to 7 years, and have, in fact done so throughout its 300 year History, but only very occasionally do they dissociate into a full-blown Social Revolutionary situation, when the whole System begins to Collapse!

Now, in many of these Crises, when the organisations of the Under Class forced compromise situations onto the Employing Class, political gains could be achieved by the Under Class, but they invariably merely prevented the situation deteriorating, for the Employers, into something much worse for them. And, over certain periods, such reforms could be established, but never forever. For, at the next Crisis the Employers would always attempt to remove such gains.

The Key confusion within the Working Class, was caused by the False Promise of such reforms ultimately achieving Justice, permanently, for the Working Class, so that the "Horror" of Social Revolution would NEVER be necessary.

But, that both deliberately ignores the real Dynamics of Social Change, and, at the same time, consciously by that always comparatively privileged layer, in the Middle Classes, opposing Revolution with absolutely everything that they do and say, and actually collect as many counter-arguments as possible - some of which appear very intellectual and "superior" to the reactions of "uneducated Workers"!

The commonest ploy of this group, is always to claim that they are "of the Left", and "prove it" by joining every kind of protest organisation, giving them a necessary Left Cover, while they seek their Ideal (Non Revolutionary) Formulations.

...

And a vital component, indeed The Touchstone, in the Theory of an aspiring Marxist Revolutionary has to be in the constant on-going analysis of Crises occurring worldwide: it is how the Penetrating Understanding that will be essentially required in the midst of a Revolution, can be honed to the state when-and-where it could be effectively used.

In the period, at the begining of the 20th century, after the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia, Lenin, a leader of the Bolshevik Party, had to leave Russia, and live full-time in Switzerland, in order to escape the attensions of the Czarist Police. Yet, by the beginning months of 1917, the Czar had been deposed - but his war with Germany continued -- though by April, Lenin knew he had to be back in Russia, as his own Party was supporting the War. He negotiated with the Germans to allow him to return to Russia, where he would pull Russia out of the War. Finally, they agreed, but only if it was via a sealed train through Germany. But, as soon as he arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd, he immediately gave a speech condemning the War, and subsequently wrote his April Theses, arguing for a change in policy by the Bolsheviks. By July armed soldiers from Kronstadt arrived at Bolshevik Party Headquarters demanding that the Bolsheviks lead them to the Winter Palace to arrest the Provisional Government. Most of Lenin's colleages, knowing it was much too soon, were for sending the troops back to Kronstadt, but Lenin alone demurred! It was, indeed, too soon, he adnmitted, but when the right time came, THESE were the forces to arrest the Government, and Lenin convinced the Party to support them, with Trotsky to lead them. They marched to The Winter Palace, but were vastly outnumbered, and Trotsky was jailed, and immediately Lenin had to escape to Finland in disguise! But by October, with the right wing General Kornilov advancing upon Petrograd with a large force, the time had finally come. The Kronstadters were immediately sent to arrest the Provisional Government, which they did, and Lenin strode to the rostrum in the All Russian Congress of Soviets and declared -

"We shall now construct the Socialist Order!"

Lenin did not plan the Revolution: he knew he couldn't do that!

But, when it naturally occurred as the system collapsed, he was constantly identifying and interpreting the Phases of Development, and their current potentialities! Until Lenin and his Bolsheviks could intervene, WITH the support of the Workers and Peasants in arms, with the slogan "Bread, Peace and Land"

Now, Marx, in spite of his magnificent contributions to Dialectical Materialism, did not, in his lifetime, comprehensively extend it beyond a basically "Macro Approach" to History, and a similar, if more detailed and analytic approach to Capitalist Economics.

Indeed without its essential comprehensive application to the Primary repository of Knowlege and Understanding, as had been built up, in the Sciences and other Intellectual Disciplines, is Real Understanding would never be sufficient to become the default Approach to Understanding ALL of Reality-as-is.

Subsequently, the door to Idealist Alternatives would always not only be wide open, but also occasionally offer moments of Truth, that without the underlying Basis supplied by Materialism, would and indeed have, delivered a veritable avalanche of misleading alternatives, which have NO SUCH restriction upon Causality!

Whether it be via Writers, Commentators, Academics or Political Organisations, without a Comprehensive Dialectical Materialist Basis, their extractsed stance could only be some collection of Idealist Intellectual conceptions, and, consequently, would NEVER equip those involved to direct their subsequent effective interventions.

So, when the key times come, and desperately require appropriate informing intervention, what they extract-and-implement will never be effective, either in its built-in understanding, in its conceptions of what determines change within a Developing situation, like a Revolution!

Indeed, no matter how elevated, and imbued with Justice a political stance and programme is, it can never be based upon the ability to accurately predict the detailed future, but it simply MUST be capable of "interpreting Real Change" on the fly, and, changing emphasis as appropriate, in all the nuances of such Changes, in the remarkable Event that is a Social Revolution! Those organisations who participate in such an Event, with a "Now-and-Forever Programme", are bound to fail - for the Enemy Class will change its positions constantly - seeking to protect their weath and privilege, they will, as they always have done, con and mislead the People...

Dialectical Materialism as a Revolutionary political weapon is NOT a fixed and correct Stance, BUT, on the contrary, a constant means of addressing every problem as it arises dynamically, with a resounding Truth faster than the Enemy's Lies!

For apart from responding to their changes of direction, we must also be wrong-footing them with our own judgement of changes in the mood and temoer of our own Working Class : and ours will be principled, while their's will not!

Random Noise and Holism

...

PREFACE - for Mick

I started this paper before I had sufficiently realised the significance of your excellent essay. So, I am inserting this short explanatory introduction as you and I (as far as I understand it) represent two different and valid approaches to supposed "Random Noise" holistic interpretations. I find your essay to be profound and significant, and describing why Photography has the qualities that it does because its images always endow ambiguity, because they only deliver frozen stills of what is still in the process of change. It explains your necessary preoccupations in both your ideas, and your produced photographs, and is crucially important.

Interestingly, I am NOT a photographer, but nevertheless I too am struggling to extract the invisible components of change in seemingly static, stable situations, BECAUSE at some point, they will reveal themselves in an Emergence - an interlude of relatively sudden Qualitative Changes. I too start with multiple, simultaneous material processes that are very quickly hidden within a "Balanced Stability" of seemingly static Forms or Patterns. But, of course, it is actually a still-active state and certainly not an unchanging one.

So, in BOTH our cases, your condemnation of removing the seemingly Random Noise is absolutely correct (and for the reasons you say), Noise is NOT what it seems, but the only route to revealing what is hidden beneath our extractions and our interpretations. Destroying Noise is typical of all Pluralist study, which only sees essence in the overt relations which can easily be extracted.

Needless to say, I too want to "analyse-the-fog", but I am not dealing with a Static Photograph, but instead, an active "Balanced Stability", where the thing I want to remove is the obvious "pluralist Balanced Stability" relation, hopefully leaving only the previously hidden nut both active and required factors necessary to complete a Dialectical Analysis.

Finally, there is a whole other contribution encouraged by the "Random Noise", which is the constant, and oft-employed ability of the Brain to "fill an ambiguous Gap with "fitting" images from Memory!

 

 

In a paper by Dr. Mick Schofield - who is a Lecturer in Media Studies, specialising in Photography at Leeds University, England, and a long time collaborator with me on the SHAPE Journal - he raises a whole range of important questions concerned with the illusions unavoidably triggered in the perceptions of viewers from within photographs, containing excessive blurring or graining.

Now, as I am an almost-blind philosopher and scientist, myself, I have been plagued also, by something clearly related to these phenomena, but in my case involving Direct Seeing of the World. Considerable losses to the macular regions in both of my eyes have also led to aberrations in viewing that are definitely not there in the Real World being observed!

The main problem in my case was soon diagnosed as the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which in the more extreme cases of vision loss, led to revealing important brain functions, which were also clearly everyday useful parts of normal Direct Seeing, but, involving not only less precise information from the Non-Macular areas of the retinas, within my eyes, which it appears, from my investigations and considerations as being wholly replaced by "tilings" taken from recent or older limited-and-squared-off remembered samples, or, alternatively, from still currently available images, taken from seen-areas, that "approproiately" exist all-around the missing direct view, with tiled exact copies - "filling-in any blanks", in other words NOT entirely using actual direct images, of what was being looked at then and there.

It is a well-known trick by magicians, to purposely draw your attention away from where they are doing something, that they do not want you to see, to an area of the real scene, that your brain is no longer receiving as a direct view, BUT only via these repeated memory tilings in which you are not really seeing the present moment, but static fragments of the past. So when he brings your gaze back, in that directly viewed place, real current information is again used, so the magician's hidden trick magically appears!

Now Dr. Schofield is concerned primarily with what happens in observing a photograph, and particularly when the captured image contains a great deal of confusing Noise, and apart from his valid and important contribution, it seems highly likely that "insertions" similar to the ones I have described above could also be involved here - for, as the above trick proves, this neurological process appears to be happening extensively all of the time, but mostly away from the primary focus of the observer's eyes.

Now, this area only came to my attention because being a sufferer from the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, I am also daily concerned with attempting a valid Holistic-Stance-Criticism, of the usual descriptions of natural phenonena, that has prevailed ever since the Greek Intellectual Revolution of the 5th century BC. For, thereafter, Mankind, on having discovered Pluralist Rationality within the building of the Discipline of Pure Forms alone (namely that of Mathematics), quite validly, about forever FIXED Relations, and finding that a valid Approach, extremely beneficial in that area, were so enamoured of its power, that they immediately and wrongly applied it, wholesale, to both General Reasoning and All of The Sciences too. Indeed, from that Intellectual Revolution right up to the present day, that gravely mistaken Stance has been largely maintained as such, in both of these important areas of Reasoning. So, crucially it applies in most Cerebral Reasoning, AND, even more importantly, in the description, interpretation and explanation of observed phenomena! We look for single causes, acting alone, as Fixed Natural Laws, and ignore not only the many others acting simultaneously, BUT significantly also their mutual qualitative effects upon one another too.

And such an omission also leaves out all Qualitative Changes, for "Fixed Natural Laws" can only SUM, and therefore only Complicate, rather than Develop! A whole rich and important set of these effects are ignored, and wholly static and unchanging areas such as photographs will NOT benefit by a return to the very same fixed image, whereas repeated returns to what initially seems to be a fixed situation in Reality, can and does deliver the subtle changes that make for alternative interpretations as The Buddha so profoundly observed in his Loka Sutta.

Let us be resolutely holist, and state that Noise is due solely to multiple simultaneous contributory causal factors - of so many different processes and their relative proportions, that the result appears "totally Random", with every direction and speed of the causing processes so reasonably evenly shared as to give a false impression of reflecting none of its many contributions!

But in any direct viewing situation the variety of possible contributuons is never infinite. Indeed the evident natural stabilities (that regularly present themselves and persist for very long periods) seem to infer both an increasing limitation upon the number of such factors, and the tendency to filter out completely the more insignificant ones, along with the preponderance of almost direct opposites to diminish the effect of those opposite processes, while maintaining them as still existing balanced pairs.

Now this alternative conception, would make destroying the confusing background Random Noise, the equivalent of throwing out the baby with the bathwater!

"Why?" 

Because that Random Noise is a still existing collection of simultaneous processes, currently subdued, but nonetheless vital, as balances change within the overall mix.

And what should be removed once it has been established, must be the clearly evident ones, leaving what is left to deliver its effects, and probably showing different effects and extractables, thereafter.

This paper and discussion follows on from the issues raised in the last issue of SHAPE Journal (Truth and Illusion, Special Issue 70). You can read the full edition here

Socialism, Science & Energy

 

Beating the Pandemic, Economic Depression and Climate Change - only Socialism and Nuclear Fusion can do it!

Deep down, everyone now knows that Capitalism and its Ruling Oligarchs will definitely never beat the combined threat of the Current Slump and the Global Covid19 Pandemic, because to do it would have to end their Worldwide Dominance. Look at the almost incessant Wars in the last couple of centuries - absolutely ALL OF THEM to maintain, extend or transfer that particular mode of wealth and power.

NO - All the usual past "solutions" cannot possibly solve it - and Capitalism is fundamentally opposed to what is necessary to reverse catastrophic climate change. 

The current multiple crises facing humanity are too devastating to be addressed in the old ways (scientific, social or economic), for many of these crises are now becoming existential - the continuance of the Human Race now solidly embarked upon a series of terminal swoops towards a guaranteed oblivion!

We need both

The Rule of the People

&

Nuclear Fusion

to totally reorient things and finally break forever the malignant Power of a Ruling Capitalist Class.

Nothing else can do it!

AND, for the first time in human history, this is now clearly possible. The pieces of the puzzle exist, at least.

However the Super Rich will never cede The World to its Working Classes. They have proved that they will go to World War to maintain their wealth, position and privilege. Remember it wasn't the Nazis that dropped Two Atomic Bombs upon civilians, but the United States of America, who dropped them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war had already been won - primarily as a warning to the communists.

But for many decades the various committed activists and political organisations, on different fronts, have insisted upon their perceived Crisis as the Primary Danger, and have refused to join forces with the many other movements, but with the present devastating simultaneous many-sided Crises all coming together at once, the insistence upon separate struggles is quite obviously self-defeating and WRONG.

For now, the very best of the Nuclear Fusion Scientists has joined the fray in earnest, with the leading Focus Fusion Group, around Eric Lerner, coming out with a new video linking Energy Generation and the Fight for Socialism as crucial allies in the Overall Struggle!

A United Front of all the Fighting Organisations must be forged to remove the Common Enemy - the Ruling Billionaires.

And the means to remove ALL the causes of the Existential Crises is now clearly imminent and Led by One of Us!

The world must be reclaimed and saved for the majority of the population. Look at the mess The Ruling Class are making of Fighting Covid 19 and the Slump!

FIGHT

for

Socialism, Democracy & a Future! NOW!

COVID-19 and global financial collapse?

 

Eric Lerner is quickly becoming one of our favourite thinkers at SHAPE Journal. Not only is he pioneering holist materialist science with his research into Nuclear Fusion and green energy solutions, his political and economic analysis is equally on point!

Special Issue 70: Truth and Illusion

Read Special Issue 70 of the SHAPE Journal

This special edition of the journal is co-authored by science philosopher Jim Schofield and artist researcher Mick Schofield.

Art, Science and Philosophy all share the same ontological quest of approaching truth, albeit with very different methods, ideologies and results, but there are countless pitfalls along all three roads, and many of them share the same origin. All three rely on appearances and forms as their basic material. Even the most apparently unmediated of these, are still Abstractions from the material world, and can already be deceptive. And that is long before we start categorising, rationalising, manipulating and combining forms, in all the elaborate ways we have learned to do, but which ultimately push these forms further from their original contexts in reality.

We primarily rely on our senses to confirm whether forms are true or not, but many philosophers over the centuries have shown that this can be a mistake. Optical illusions are often used to demonstrate how we cannot trust our senses - that there is some barrier between us and the truth of the material world we observe. However this is a limited view - it fails to take into account the fact that most of the time our senses serve us very well, we find our immediate realities completely intelligible. They also fail to take into account a key paradoxical fact, that illusions can actually give greater access to reality, than our senses alone can offer.

Think of the mirror, for example. Until we encounter a reflection we have no idea what we look like.

A reflection is certainly an illusion however, and one we routinely trust to tell us the truth, despite the fact that it flips the entire world front-to-back. For Jacques Lacan the mirror illusion was fundamental to how we see ourselves and our relationship with the reality around us. The mirror stage is a crucial phase in the development of human infants, where the ego begins to develop as we see ourselves as an ideal image, and fundamentally separate from others for the first time. Before this, according to Lacan, we live in the Real Stage, where we are only concerned by our immediate bodily needs and a lived unity with our mothers.

Another crucial illusion we rely on to access information about ourselves and the world, are moving pictures. These are based on photography, which also makes clever use of mirrors and tricks of the light, to present authentication of how things look. The photographic illusion, while synonymous with evidence, is compounded when we use machines to play back one photograph after another. All moving images present a basic illusion of movement - a motion that is constructed from a series of stillnesses. This isn’t how motion works in reality at all - and yet, we have simulated it well enough to trick the eye with ease.

The illusions of moving images provide us with reliable evidence of things all of the time - augmenting our senses and providing access to aspects of reality we could never approach without such technological prostheses. Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin talks about this in his famous essay on The Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction, calling this new technologically-aided sense, the optical unconscious.

But there are certainly limitations to our amazing inventions. We become so reliant on them for information, we cease to notice their shortcomings and distortions of the truth. Jim Schofield’s research with Bedford Interactive into the capturing of dance on video for motion study, showed how much dynamic information is lost when we rely on a series of stills to record it. His use of Zeno’s paradoxes and dialectical reasoning in attempting to resolve the problem shows this is more than just an issue of inadequate technical solutions. The very contradiction of trying to understand motion through stillness was bound to surface sooner or later, even if this particular illusion is adequate for most purposes.

This conundrum also reminds me of Henri Bergson’s view of our cinematic view of reality - another philosopher influenced by Zeno. Bergson used the “cinematographical apparatus” as an analogy for how the intellect attempts to deal with truth - always fragmenting, abstracting, analysing phenomena into discontinuous constituent parts, and then attempting to understand the dynamic whole from these debris.

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially.” Bergson, 1907

The video camera is a science experiment. It takes small pieces, samples, data, and tries to understand the dynamic whole. But something is always lost. Such illusions can be very useful, the difficulty then lies in working out what isn’t translated, and the extent to which we might be kidding ourselves.

As Jim Schofield investigates in his paper on Charles Bonnet Syndrome in this issue, a form of illusion lies at the heart of vision itself. As with Bergson, this isn’t just about technology, or even scientific methods, but about the ways we think about reality, and maybe even something fundamental about how our brains work.

Mick Schofield, October 2020

Read Special Issue 70 of the SHAPE Journal

The Origin of the Ruling Classes

The ruling class obtained their power and wealth using violence

Long, long ago, in a now-totally-vanished Early Civilisation, certain dedicated people struggled with all their might to begin to understand Reality-as-it-actually-existed. And in that initial, and mostly pre-Productive era, the main purpose was always primarily to see what caused things to both Change and even Develop, in the ways that nature clearly did. 

These were remarkable People, having only recently abandoned the nomadic of existence of their forefathers, and conquered how to work-with-Nature, settle in a single permanent place, and plant-and-tend crops, as well as pen-in and domesticate certain animals, they had crossed the Rubicon, that had long restricted their development, which had lasted, scarcely-changing, for literally millions of years. 

They knew what they had achieved, and were already beginning to think differently about the world. And also, to consider what other possibly different behaviours could also be tried-out, that might, in the future, produce dramatically different alternative possibilities. And, the purposes for establishing such objectives, were seen to be to both explaining their own Past History, and, armed with such understanding, perhaps be in such a position to avoid old mistakes, and to struggle instead for something a whole lot better!

But that wasn't yet happening. 

For instead, other groups of people, who were NOT such seekers of truth, and were still living as constantly-wandering Hunter/Gatherers, were motivated by seeing those settled people, who were clearly much better off than they were, to instead shape their future by the Use of Force - directed entirely to acquire those things using violence, for their own exclusive benefit, BUT, at the same time, effectively preventing others from doing that very same thing to them.

And those possible builders of an alternative future, currently enjoying the benefits of a productive life, were not yet equipped to attempt to either understand or withstand the warlike objectives of jealous onlookers from outside: who did know what they, themselves, were already fully capable of achieving, such things, just as they had in the past, by the obvious use of Force. They could vanquish any possible present and future opponents by employing a First Strike Strategy, and then, thereafter, remaining fully-equipped to perpetuate their achieved dominance, if ever they were challenged, both either by those that they now ruled, or by any wholly new forces, with the very same objectives as they themselves had originally pursued. But, such rule by conquest was no contract between rulers and ruled: there was no doubt as to who was in charge.

The earliest raids were just surprise attacks, and the attackers couldn't take-and-carry-off very much, but the hunters could inflict serious hurt and even deaths upon the defenders, and would be back frequently, if some form of effective defence were not put in place. But the only at-all-competent defenders would be other groups of Hunter/Gatherers, and they would not usually be either available nor willing when required.

Ultimately, a surprising solution was settled upon by chance, when desperate Hunter/Gatherers were taken in and helped by a Farming community, and then when a raid occurred, the hunters who had been taken in effectively defended their new friends, and beat the invaders off. And a deal was made, that in return for such defences, the Farming Community would continue to provide the needs of their Hunter defenders.

And, after a series of successful defences, the "Village Hunters" quickly became lauded heroes, and sometimes were even asked to be the leaders and protectors of the Community.

So, initially from good intentions, the Community had acquired a nascent Ruling Leadership of non productive warrior leaders. And a New Class had been established whose greatest asset was their ability to Fight-and-Win, but certainly NOT to work!

So, the later Leaders and Defenders of civilization would naturally come from this now privileged Class. 

And, they would want to maintain their Status and Privileges, even long after their use as Defenders ceased to be either necessary or possible.

And today, long after this leader/defender role has vanished - and after so much social upheaval in the name of equality and social progress - the Class that so became established at the dawn of civilisation, still largely remain in place.

Have a look at today's ruling class and the activities they enjoy if you're in any doubt...

The Fundamental Error of Quantum Mechanics

A Right Criticism

but 

The Wrong Solution

There is a Stanford "Continuing Education" Lecture, by Leonard Susskind, the purpose of which is supposedly to deliver, to a collection of mature-and-interested general auditors, an interesting Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, and its Foundations in Theory.

But Susskind's Lecture, from its very outset, instead attempts to ground his criticisms of Classical Physics, solely from a Quantum Mechanical (basically a Copenhagen) standpoint, via what seems initially to be a valid revelation of the fundamental-and-debilitating weaknesses of the former. 

He wrongly puts it down to congenital errors, due to actual "inaccuracies-in-measurements", but he does it, by inferring that the blame should be put solely upon the unavoidably inadequate means used in obtaining them, instead of Classical Physics' actually wholly flawed and totally inadequate mathematical rationality, which ever since its inception in Ancient Greece, was wholly incorrectly and damagingly transferred to ALL the Sciences.

Susskind does not even recognise this problem - but he also, in attaching the errors solely to poorly arranged-for experimental means, thereby delivering the blamed evident inaccuracies of the results obtained.

But in that he is doubly wrong: for his criticisms, which still leave him (and his auditors) totally unaware of the real causes, so, both cannot, in any way, deliver a solution, but also, in that wrong attribution, he completely hides the real causes, and, therefore, allows his "purely theoretically-perfected" equations to be the ONLY Ultimate Sources of Truth.

He establishes his position by this as totally idealist.

He establishes it NOT via Reality, but through Mathematical Rationality alone.

Theoretical Physicists have always dealt with all experimentally achieved results and consequently theoretically interpreted them via the mistakenly applied Pluralist Rationality, which sees all extracted relations solely as products of Eternally Fixed Natural Laws. That ONLY come out of the consequently formulated and theoretically confirmed Equations. The data so originally achieved will NOT be the Form that is required, but, on the contrary, that imposed upon the situation by just those constraints that ensure its total conformity to Plurality.

We do not directly measure Reality-as-is, but a Reality so constrained as to reveal more clearly only exactly what is purposely sought! But, unless the data-producing experiments required for the usual Pluralist Approach have been "perfectly applied", both in how the experiments were set-up-and-maintained throughout, they will never deliver the exactly aimed-for data, which is necessary, and will instead only produce data certain to differ from what could be either achieved in such sufficiently-rigidly controlled experiments OR taken directly from prior, "accurate" individual Equations, as all simultaneously-acting Laws are assumed to be wholly independent of one another, and hence arranged to be extracted one-at-a-time - pluralistically!

Whereas, in the actual Real Holist World outside, those could, if done correctly, actually reflect Reality-as-it-actually-is.

The problem is that the Rationality of Mathematics, as fully exemplified in Euclidian Geometry, did indeed define a legitimate Rationality - it works flawlessly - but ONLY in constrained areas. This is solely because Form, unlike almost everything else in Reality, does indeed soundly conform to Plurality's rules: a specific Logic for dealing with a Discipline composed exclusively of separable entires and FIXED relations or Unchanging Laws!

But, the trouble was, that following the universal successes of Pluralist Logic, it was applied to all the sciences, in a way which omitted the richness and dynamism of the material Universe.

In assuming that revealed relations are Eternal Natural Laws, all Real Development is excluded.

And, Susskind, in his Lecture, then proceeds to "Compound the Felony", by marshalling all his arguments, via the same mistaken Rationality. He correctly demonstrates the inability to predict in literally ALL situations, but instead makes it solely due to measured inaccuracies, whereas the most important of them are all due to the total exclusion of handling All Qualitative Change. 

And, he conversely puts down the simple addition of results into more complex situations, as due to the very same reason - rather than the actual reason that classical Pluralist Physics cannot deal with Reality-as-is, and merely substitutes, instead, the additions of multiple Fixed Laws, for the actual totally unknown and unconsidered Real Qualitative Changes that are involved.

He declares that the Double Slit Experiments all totally prove his case, whereas the opposite is true. 

Their paradoxes, on the contrary, and much like those of Zeno, expose the fundamental inadequacies of Pluralist Logic.

[See "The Theory of the Double Slit Experiments" in SHAPE Journal]

And, in a significantly ineffectual following section, he then resorts (as is usual for him) to proving his case using Mathematical Equations alone - the very cause of the major failures, to "prove" the opposite!

NOTE:

A whole series of papers dedicated to a major prior series of lectures by Susskind, has also been published in SHAPE Journal, but give-yourself-time, SHAPE has been publishing for 11 years now, delivering 125 issues with perhaps somewhat more than 1000 individual papers available!

Having spent most of my professional life posing these difficult questions, the importance of this now mature philosophical stance in addressing what is wrong with Modern Physics, is also succesfully employed across many different disciplines, from Politics to Evolutionary Biology. 

The flaws of the dominant Pluralist stance are revealed inadvertently by Susskind himself, for he passionately believes in Pluralistic Theory over-and-above any messy purely Pragmatic Extractions from Reality-as-is. 

When presented with "beautiful", generally consistent-and-coherent elegant Theory, and the messy error-filled "facts" from Nature, he resolutely chooses the Former as "containing the Real Truth". 

However difficult, Reality must be our final arbiter. 

Anything else can only be delusional!

 

How can we defeat capitalism?

Building Socialist Political Parties 

and Organising for Real Social Change

In spite of several major Crises, such as the decade-long slump in the 1930s, and the similar and still continuing Depression commencing in 2008, the problems which caused them have not, and indeed cannot, be solved, whilever we live within a Capitalist Economic System.

For, it is primarily driven by maximising Profit for the Few, while directly extracting the wherewithall to maintain and extend the System from the the work and the pockets majority of the People - the Many!

And, the consequences throughout the last century have been totally horrendolus -

TWO World Wars with literally Tens of Millions of Deaths - entirely due to rival Capitalist powers wanting bigger shares.

And, also, there have been Revolutions in TWO of the biggest Countries in the World, whose stated purpose was to build Socialism and bury Capitalism for ever!

So, how has Capitalism survived?

While the evidence for its necessary termination is both everywhere and profuse: why have The People not rebelled and overturned this exploitative and unequal System?

It is primarily because literally ALL the means of disseminating and framing Information are in the biased hands of the Wealthy, and even the apparently Democratic Political Systems, worldwide, have been bought to both speak and act always in a pro-capitalist way.

Yet, even so, it has all been insufficient, and we are now living within a period of literally constant wars - either to suppress any divergence from the pro Capitalist Bloc, or to suppress any challenge to the dominance of the current hegemony of the Leading Capitalist Power - the USA. And, no matter what setbacks the war-mongers get, they simply redouble their efforts, to maintain the status quo - one way or another!

It is becoming an existential Crisis for Capitalism, and as they have NO solutions - they still carry on with the vast increases in Debt, which precipitated the continuing Crisis of 2008! It hasn't been a solution to that, so stepping it up again to even higher levels won't solve things now.

So, how can the People break out of their currently powerless position?

They have to FIRST bypass the usual means, and take to the streets!

And, then they must strive to build new Socialist Political Parties with the Theory necessary to inform their actions.

And that MUST be Marxist - BUT NOT the distorted versions of the Stalinist / Communist Parties, and even the Trotskyist aberrations of the 20th century, but a NEW and Genuine Marxism, based upon the philosophical and political contributions of Karl Marx - but brought up to date and fully extended into Science, where it is currently exposing the myths of Modern Sub Atomic Physics, as well as rejecting the many Damaging Revisions, in the name of Marxism, which are no such thing!

There is no shortage of Issues... Get out there and DEMONSTRATE!

Focus Fusion: Why Nuclear Fusion Cannot Be Solved By Current Methods

Fusion and Philosophy

The Currently Impassible Barrier To Solving Nuclear Fusion

And A Possible Solution...

The writer of this paper has spent his whole adult life as a qualified physicist and mathematician. Highly critical of both disciplines his research actually attempts to remove the wrongly imposed (very-rational, yet mistaken) Philosophical Basis of the last two and a half millennia in these areas, as they relate to one another in the current crisis of Sub Atomic Physics.

For, in "crossing the rubicon" from School Science and Mathematics, at which I really excelled, over to the study of these subjects at University level, I had enthusiastically expected it to be a mighty leap into revealing something of the True Content of Reality. However, I was mightily disappointed by the series of defeats that had evidently been suffered in Physics, and the consequent overall surrender, and unavoidable retrenchment back to a majorly pragmatic retreat. 

The basically Idealist subscription of making Pure Form the Sole Determinator of Reality, won out over the difficulties of Materialism - and hence Mathematics was promoted significantly, from its role as Handmaiden to the Sciences, into the veritable Queen of them.

And the unavoidable consequence of this, turned out to be the profound limitation of those Sciences, into the only then possible developable bases, for Mathematics as such - in its essential Plurality - not only empowered that area of study to develop into Mankind's first ever Intellectual Discipline, but also and damagingly, imposed profound limitations, by adopting the same basis, building up from fixed laws and entities. 

For, while this significantly empowered the Discipline by enabling a consistent and comprehensive Range of Valid Relations between Forms, they were thereafter immutable. And, of course, such a System could never be comprehensively employed in any areas wherein Qualitative Changes and Innovative Development was wholly unavoidable.

Now, elsewhere, I have pursued the above position more generally with respect to its affect upon my own major professional area, of Sub Atomic Physics and Substrate Theory, but here, will have to concentrate upon a particular area, Nuclear Fusion, as is supposedly being developed for the Direct Generation of Electricity, as such a study, very clearly, reveals the disabling limitations in what is elsewhere a more generally applicable way.

For, ever since the development of the Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs by the USA, there has been the objective of using these vast producers Enormous Amounts of Energy, in more useful areas of Human Activity, and increasingly, as the continued use of Carbon-based Fuels are clearly beginning to negatively affect things from Pollution to the existential threat of runaway Climate Change. 

Nuclear Fission proved a little dangerous!

And, in my area of Physics, the biggest failures of understanding occur where Qualitative Change is totally unavoidable, while the usually applied Pluralist-Dominated-Theory in that precise area never actually copes with such changes, not least because all Physics Theory is permanently locked into purely mathematical theories, and simply cannot ever cope with situations involving multiple, simultaneous, active factors.

The usual way of doing Physics is to reveal totally pluralist mathematical Equations, and by doing so,   "supposedly" accurately describing what actually happens. But they certainly do not do that! For such Equations to work, they can only be applied in Maintained Stable situations. as are always considered essential in deriving all laws in Physics. So, such Pluralist Stance Physics is also totally inadequate in delivering a theory for the Processes of Nuclear Fusion.

And the usual route followed has-to-be concerned with Stabilised and maintained-as-such processes only.

So, as with all Production Processes currently in use, a complex overall process with a succession of very different Qualitative Phases, can only be achieved by a whole series of completely-separated individual Processes, each one with its own severely restricted aand maintained context, and driven by a Single Pluralist Law, and, thereafter, followed by a sequence of others, each one with different purposes, contexts and its own different particular laws.

And in Nuclear Fusion such an approach can't possibly work, and the reasons for this are significant!

It is nothing like a Production sequence of Processes in a Factory.

For in Fusion the components are the same ones throughout, BUT they change qualitatively at each and every stage.

And as far as I can tell, only one researcher is attempting to address this problem as a Single, Multi-Phase Overall and Integrated Process.

Is Eric Lerner doing Holistic Materialism?

It is Eric Lerner in his Focus Fusion System!

And having also watched many explanatory accounts wedded exclusively to the Universally-adopted Pluralist system, which "seeking some form of Stability" as its basis for investigating Reality, and consequently having to necessarily have to divide up both the investigations, AND the ultimate Implementations, into their wholly seperate-and-maintained individual Phases, OR, alternatively, build absolutely Mammoth, combined constructions, that attempt to automate that necessary passage-through a separated sequence, within a complicated and articulated enclosed whole, but, nevertheless with all Parts STILL conforming, individually, to the Pluralist, Stability-first Approach.

So what is different about Lerner's approach in Focus Fusion?

He does not seek Stabilities, for any individual parts of this system! Instead, he welcomes the transitions from one Phase to the next. And always attempts to finally understand Reality "on the fly!"

And, crucially, he designs his system, so that each New Phase is provided with its appropriate place to develop - designing his apparatus so that the action moves things, automatically, each to its own ideal setting, as the different Phases naturally occur. He uses the careful design of his apparatus, and the everywhere-available natural forces, as well as the expected developments occurring within his apparatus, to deliver the necessary transitions between Phases, and also, of course, exactly to where they will occur.

And he also designs the sequence of Forms involved, so that the natural "Pinch Effects" of the moving Plasma he is using, to naturally further concentrate his "medium", more at each and every Phase, to continually raise its pressure and temperature towards that required for ultimate Fusion.

And, he is doing it with only a four-person-team, and woefully inadequate Funding! And his approach is NOT pluralist!

He takes Reality as-it-is, and "Rides the Tiger", with increasing skill and understanding.

Another great example of a burgeoning holistic materialist methodology for science.

Exciting!

Of Cycles and Dialectics

 

Dialectical Dynamics

In Part 17 of David Harvey’s series of Lectures upon Marx’s Grundrisse, he reveals some crucial features of Marx’s version of Dialectics, based upon the repeated Cycles developed in the very intrinsic dynamics of both establishing the wholly New, within processes that then become parts of repeated Cycles, and which in their subsequent development, also elicit other consequent related Cycles, all of which, thereafter, mutually-determine each other’s qualities!

But they never settle into finally Fixed Forms. This can be confusing for readers of Marx, who expect definitions of things to stay the same - as they do in all Pluralist forms of study.

Indeed, they are always undergoing constant changes, and suffering consequent Crises, for Dialectics indeed emphasizes the Holist nature of Reality!

Now, this makes it very different for Classical Formal Logic (a Pluralist view), which has dominated all Reasoning since the Ancient Greek Intellectual Revolution. This Logic must consider things Qualitatively Fixed, though they can vary Quantitatively, and so-called Understanding becomes a kind of Logical Game - with fixed rules! The most fundamental rule of all forbids contradiction.

And, this meant that, for well over two millennia, that there was NO way of explaining Qualitative Development - which was reduced to Quantitative changes of fixed entities. So though the wholly New was often recognised, it could never be explained: a crude “Quantity into Quality” was merely assumed, and its circumstances noted, and used to predict when & How such things may change, but never Why!

But, certainly, how Marx understood such things, in his Grundrisse, was revealing its intricaces to Harvey!

And, some of the most revolutionary processes are revealed there as to how-and-why the wholly New could first emerge, give birth to other consequent processes and cycles, and were then, unavoidably, transformed, recursively by their own creations!

Indeed, though neither Marx nor Harvey were aware of it, recent research into both long-lasting Natural Stabilities within Reality, and their roles both within and outside of Emergent Interludes have been recognised and both described and explained via the concept of “Balanced Stabilities” - Stability itself is not only dynamic, but contradictorily accomplished via change.

For, these are combined phenomena, due to many simultaeous processes acting together, in balancing pairs, which fairly quickly, when subjected to cycles of variability, gradually filter out lesser contributions, yet establish relatively stable pairs of opposing processes, which effectively deliver an overall, co-ordinating bunch of these, which together provide a self-maintaining Stability overall, and, which is usually self-maintaining, for extended periods of time, but which can in extreme circumstances, precipitate an overall dissociation of all the individual component “balances” and finally cause the overall collapse of the complete “Balanced Stability” - a Revolution, in fact!

In consequence usually immediately forming new opposing Balanced Pairs, and ultimately composite Bundles in wholly New “Balanced Stabilities” in so- called “Emergent Interludes”

And elsewhere, and over time, these features, and others like them, are THE ONLY explanations for real, entirely- innovative creation of the totally NEW! Evolution is impossible with a strictly pluralist view of Reality.

And, the holistic mutal affecting of multiple simulateous processes, and cycles, makes the incredibly long odds of changes by mere Random Chance, in an entirely Pluralist World, a total non-starter!

Also, and perhaps even more important, the Pluralist set up is exactly what leads to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, permanently immobile Stability as the end point of varying factors, and the whole concept of Entropy as nonsense.

And, perhaps, even more importantly, the many wrong turnings due to Plurality, have been the myriads of contradictions that it has caused, initially in the division of studies of Reality into separate “Subjects” and “Specialisms” as a workaround, but most profoundly of all in dispensing with very effective Logical Models like The Aether, as an undetectable Universal Substrate filling all of Space, and the dispensing of Physical Explanations, replacing them with INADMISSIBLE, entirely pluralist mathematical Equations, which contain none of this crucial dynamic quality, whatsoever.

Reality may not have any pre-ordained directions of Progress, but it certainly behaves very differently when everything can potentially affect and transform everything else.

Exploring this brave new world is where Science must go next.

This post was taken from Issue 70 of SHAPE Journal entitled Cycles. 

Issue 70 of SHAPE Journal: Cycles

Read the Issue

This edition features a collection of essays by philosopher Jim Schofield on the importance of studying cycles.

It is becoming ever clearer that Repeated Cycles of Processes turn out to be imperative at all levels of Reality. From the enlightening holist philosophy of the Buddha, to weather patterns, metabolic pathways, life cycles and new extensions of Dialectical Logic and Physics Theory, recursive cycles are at the heart of many key attempts to understand the complexities and underlying structures of the natural world.

Key to this new study is unlocking the role cycles play in Qualitative Change, evolution in both Life and the development of matter, the interaction of vast systems and the Emergence of wholly new entities and systems. This research is vital in the development of Dialectical Materialist philosophy and SHAPE journal's attempts to rescue Science from the damaging limitations of Pluralist methodologies.

What exactly is Mathematics?

Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the purest of them all?

Mathematics isn't what people think it is. 

Even its greatest exponents have little idea what their discipline is and where it came from. 

In again watching Leonard Susskind's continuing Lecture Series from Stanford University on Quantum Mechanics; he spends most of a particularly intensive Lecture upon Pure Mathematics, establishing Complex Numbers as "Descriptors of Reality".

But what they really are, as he effectively demonstrates, (though that is most certainly NOT his intention!) are pure Abstractions from Reality. And most certainly NOT a "full & comprehensive reflection (with nothing omitted & nothing added) of Reality", but instead a:-

Mirror-like reflection

- losing most of what is intrinsically involved, in order to deliver a dramatically simplified version, which both merely and exclusively deliver a virtuality, totally without its actual determining causal content, and as such conforming ONLY to a set of Rules (as in a Game), which make what it does deliver mutually consistent with one another , BUT NOT for any intrinsic causality, but instead due to that set of Rules, independent of the Reality that was the real Causal Origin.

Now as a highly competent Mathematician, myself, I, long ago switched my allegiances to Physics, for its very different Basis as a Science of Reality-as-is! It (historically, at least) always attempted to explain things as well as describing them; and in so doing was regularly forced to correct and even extend its concrete premises, in order to remain subject to its key purposes.

But what is it about Mathematics that makes it inadequate in actually explaining Reality fully? And how does it' universal utilisation in the Sciences, distort our view of the Universe?

It was discovered in the Greek Intellectual Revolution of the 5th century BC by assuming all relations between Forms to be permanently FIXED (as they must be to enable a Formal Mathematical Rationality possible) - and this was much later embodied in the Principle of Plurality in which all such concepts are necessarily permanently fixed, for, by doing so, a fairly easily achieved self-consistent Logic as its main means could be guaranteed.

And this very first Intellectual Discipline of Mankind was so successful within Mathematics, that it was also illegitimately exported, wholesale, to both General Reasoning and all the emerging Sciences, crippling both of their attempted applications to a Clearly Evolving Reality.

Susskind constantly confirms my definition of mathematical Rationality both regularly and clearly throughout this lecture, as he extends the idea of Complex Numbers, entirely, exclusively and openly in this very way. But mentions NO actual Physics whatsoever.

Having seen many of his other Youtube Lectures, it is clear that Susskind's unifying basis for Everything he is concerned with is Mathematics: it alone Drives the World! And, he regularly sails well beyond the Three Dimensional Limits of Reality, legitimately with Time, but thereafter totally illegitimately with everything else. As long as the Determining Integrity of the reasoning is maintained, in the mathematical way, all can be stuffed into this same model!

And, of course, once everything becomes symbols on the page, related solely via Mathematical Logic, the concrete aspects fade into insignificance, enabling all sorts of Physically illegitimate reasons to justify wholly Pluralist so-called "Theories"!

Now this transformation of Physics is absolutely crucial, because the essential policemen of that Science, The Theorists, had always been absolutely essential to keep the pragmatic Technologists in their midst, in check via the physical Causality of their Theories. But, with the increasing triumph of the Mathematicians within those theorists, the whole approach in Theory was converted to wholly Pluralistic Mathematical Formulae.

Physics is being totally castrated by these changes!

And in a career-long struggle to reverse this tendency, this committed theorist had to spend the rest of his career, fighting these major inadequacies via extensive diversions into Philosophy, both of Mathematics itself, and of Physics, Chemistry and Biology, in order to find the answers, which only finally came to fruition in 2019 after many different research projects: 

The Processes and Productions of Abstraction,

The Philosophy of Mathematics,

Truly Natural Selection,

The Theory of Emergences,

Substrate Theory

and finally the Critique of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory, which took a considerable amount of time, and which have all been published in SHAPE Journal over the last 10 years, and are available for anyone to read for free.

But when will other Scientists have this same realisation about Mathematics?

Joseph E. Stiglitz and the Trajectory of Chinese Communism since 1980

Stiglitz in China

In a recent Lecture to a Norwegian Business School Conference, Joseph E. Stiglitz (from Columbia University in the USA - he has been advising the Chinese Communist Leadership since the early 1980s, upon a transition to fitting China into a Market Economy globally), was, in his contribution to that Conference, extremely informative, in ways totally unmentioned either by the Citadels of Capitalism globally, OR by the current Left, supposedly opposing that system (including, surprisingly, many of the self-professed the Marxists)!

His contribution was NOT, of course, superior to those critics of Capitalism, but it DID highlight the inadequacies of the current Left's policies for fighting for both the End of Capitalism, in the West, AND, crucially, exactly how to achieve the necessary Revolution, without the major liabilities of the Rise of Stalinist Bureaucracies, as have followed such Revolutions in the past.

Now, immediately prior to the period that Stiglitz covers, the writer of this paper was resident in Hong Kong, as a lecturer in a University there, and had visited Communist China, as an already committed Marxist. So I was aware of the then current fight between the Maoist so-called "Gang of Four" (including Mao's wife) and the "Capitalist Roaders" - led by Deng, so I knew who won that fight, and how they disagreed with Mao's "Cultural Revolution". And, I travelled through the countryside observing how the smaller Country Soviets were working. So I am able to link up Stiglitz's account to its immediate prehistory in the Chinese Communist Party. But I must emphasise, most strongly, that in spite of the great value in studying Stiglitz's account, he is, certainly, no Marxist, nor even a Socialist. He is a Capitalist Economist, who accepts Capitalism, and plots its "best possible" consequent Trajectory economically, as both essential, yet worthy of much better critical study than it is usually accorded.

Indeed, literally all the criticisms of Capitalism, that both inform and energise the Socialist and Communist oppositions to it, are totally missing in Stiglitz: for his account is more like a modern Keynesian critique of current Neoliberalist Capitalism, rather than taking a steadfast position of requiring Capitalism's total termination.

Yet interestingly, Stiglitz was brought in to help, as it became increasingly clear to the Chinese Leadership, that the insertion of some tightly regulated Capitalist enterprises in China, was running into problems with the many country-localities in China, that were not included in the joint schemes, and these leftover-and-leftout town and village "Soviets" were clearly not benefiting from the economic changes, and were beginning to oppose the plans of the Central Bureaucracy, which would ultimately reveal iteself in the Tianamen Square Events: and require a Wholly New Phase, integrating this opposition into becoming part of the New Turn, and economic boom, in what was called the TVE (Town & Village Initiative), but to make it work, any remnants of the "Soviet" nature (which I had observed when I visited China before 1980), just had to go - and this, in time, would again require yet another New Phase!

Photographs from my travels in Communist China, 1979

But, as the reader will have already imagined, the alternatives to be put forward on this blog are most certainly NOT Keynesian criticisms of Capitalism, but, on the contrary, major criticisms of the current Left's opposition to Western Capitalism, as they were surprisingly and increasingly revealed by the experiences in China in the last 40 years, which has revealed a very Marxian Trajectory of differently necessary Phases of development, as what were previously-Working-Policies ran out of steam, and had to be regularly replaced, but, in a very pragmatic - "Crossing the River by Feeling for the Stones" way, as they put it! For, every change in Policy, was NOT occurring within an established Socialist Economy, but now in a mixed Communist/Capitalist Economy, both unavoidably linked to World Capitalism, and thereby guaranteed to engender such Crises regularly, and ultimately, at some point, precipitate a Wholesale Collapse.

NO, what I intend to extract from those twisted-temporary-experiences in China, is a much better Theory, extracted from and among Real 21st century Marxists, intended to guarantee the Success of Socialist Revolution in the West!

For, a comprehensive, all-areas-applicable Marxism (more properly described as Dialectical Materialism) was not sufficiently fully defined by Karl Marx - for though his contributions were Truly Revolutionary, they were not soundly applicable when not limited only to Marx's completed work: indeed the absolutely crucial area of The Sciences, was not significantly addressed, comprehensively, until the second decade of this century, with the various critiques of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Theory published in SHAPE Journal and elsewhere on the Web, by 2019.

And, in addition, the now available extensive range of lectures by David Harvey, all now on Youtube, both on Marx's Kapital and the Grundrisse, have brilliantly revealed aspects of Marx's method and begun to make them more generally applicable, BUT ONLY if tackled in the same way as Marx had worked, and in addition by scientifically-trained-experts, not only covering the specialist ground, but also, and crucially and necessarily extending the Marxist Method.

Indeed, though he didn't realise why it was necessary, Stiglitz, in his account of the trajectory in the last 40 years of Communist China, clearly identified the various key Crises, in the sequence of required changes, which could alternatively be explained using Harvey's interpretations of Marx's Method, but extended beyond what Marx had access to.

Now, the most important re-application of these methods is NOT primarily in addressing the failures of the Stalinists in China, but, in the far more important criticisms of the truncated appreciations of Marxism currently available, and unavoidably incorrectly applied to the necessary political agitations NOW, against Capitalism in the West! For, no matter what they all call themselves, the various Left political elements are NOT equipped with the 21st century Marxism that I am talking about: and hence, necessarily, their "Theory" leads to both Strategies, Tactics and Propaganda, that are all doomed to result in failure!

And, if Proof is required, they should all be pressed to explain both the various Phases that have been forced upon the Stalinists in China, AND, even more importantly, exactly how those same analyses can be effectively applied to their own current positions and policies - for there definitely are similarities, indicating what inexplicable-to-them failures they will most certainly encounter, and hope to understand enough, to be able to plot paths around them.

And, if they cannot do it, redirect them to both Harvey and Marx's original works to effect a radical change in what they consider to be MARXISM!

For, no-one on the Left seems to be aware of the Revolutionary Situation they are careering towards at some considerable speed, and are ALL at a loss to see what transforming Transitional Demands they will undoubtedly need, to orient themselves and Their Class to what must be done!

Have they read "Ten Days that Shook the World" by John Reed?

Do they not know why the slogan "Bread, Peace and Land", was their cry, and that it worked, and why it did so?

What should our demands be?