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!