Taking SHAPE I: Denis Noble and Systems Level Approach

 

New video from SHAPE films, Taking SHAPE I, is part of new series looking at a nascent holistic science and attempting to take SHAPE Journal and these radical ideas to a new audience.

Top down or bottom up? Which method best helps us understand complex natural systems? We look at Denis Noble's "The Music of Life" and the argument that reductionism misses the vital role of multi-level systems in organising reality... But what happens when these systems fail? 

This contribution begins a new series of experimental videos on the philosophy of science from SHAPE Films. Each episode features theorist Jim Schofield discussing a different key thinker or researcher, and how their work may help the development of a new holist scientific method.

Frege, Dummett and Plurality

Origins of the Current Crisis in Philosophy

In a recent proffering on Youtube, Michael Dummett explained both the current contributions, as well as the final failures of Gottlob Frege, concerning the Philosophy of Mathematics - but, as it turned out, he was also, in fact, actually revealing the widespread mistakes, as well as the many general inadequacies, throughout all past and present Philosophers (including himself), concerning that important area of Theory.

For Frege, along with all the rest of his co-thinkers, made (and still make) Logic - some kind of crucial "Absolute", coming both uniquely and only from Man, rather than being a failed attempt, by Man, to reveal an objective set of the real changing relations, within all of Reality-as-is! But, he is, most certainly, not alone, Mankind in general has believed this for the last two and a half thousand years - indeed, ever since the Greek Intellectual Revolution of the 5th century BC.

And, they made it seem to be the case, by devising a wholly new kind of Relation, which, for the first time ever, devised relations between certain Abstractions, rather than between existing objects, and which therefore could, within those special circumstances, and types of Abstraction, be wholly Constant. But, they were NOT abstractions like the names of concretely-existing things, they were instead ONLY of one special type of relation occurring between particular kinds of Abstractions!

As this is a subtle and even surprising kind of relation, I feel that I must give some original examples, used by the Greeks, in constructing Euclidian Geometry.

The first was The Point!

Now, this abstraction was composed of a totally disembodied Position. It had absolutely zero extension in the Real World, delivering only a Position, and nothing else, but as such DID indeed have relations with other such Abstractions

- such as The Line!

Now, this was defined by two Points and delivered a Direction. It, too, had NO extension in Space, but could genuinely be related to other such Abstractions, thereby beginning to define both a Direction - and ultimately Mathematics!

Next came The Plane - and then, an extended series of others, that because of the unique disembodied relations to others of the same kind, could indeed, deliver a consistent set of extractions from Reality, which could not only be useful, but, because of their nature, deliver a Fixed System of such relations.

They had invented a Pluralist System! Now, this could seem to be a useless, if consistent System, but it turned out to be very close indeed to what Mankind had found to be the easiest way, to not only make sense of a version of Reality-as-is, but also to actually make things too.

The only way to do anything with situations in the Real World, was, first, to hold them resolutely still - as in all technology and the Scientific Method itself. This necessarily involved keeping all used situations as simple and unchanging as possible, so they were already attempting to approach the perfection of what was to become necessary for Mathematics to be legitimately applied to it.

So, the new intellectual gains made by the Greeks, coupled with the well-established Pragmatism given by "If it works, it is right!", definitively defined the Technological Ideal for getting reality to behave as desired, and indeed as required!

Now, also, these procedures fitted in well with giving sizes to the actual processes occurring in Reality, because all the measurements, with regard to some kind of Scale, was as important in trying to explain phenomena causally.

And, long before Quantitative Laws were crucial in identifying under exactly what circumstances significant Qualitative Changes occurred, and thereby suggesting Causes! They could be loosely correlated to such changes in Qualities, even if the reasons extracted were NOT Quantitative Laws, but Additional Qualitative Explanations.

Thus, Separate Explanatory Reasons necessarily grew up alongside Quantitative Laws, which though they related to Quantitative values, NEVER actually explained Why Qualitative Changes occurred, but only When!

Indeed, no strictly Quantitative Law could EVER explain any Qualitative Change. They may be associated, but NEVER causally!

However - as they say - "The tail can wag the dog!". and it did so technologically, leaving the explanations as to Why, NEVER addressed.

So Technology developed apace, leaving Explanations increasingly unaddressed.

Indeed, any remaining causal Explanations were relegated to be an accompanying narrative ONLY.

So, these two approaches almost became Different Disciplines - named Technology and Science!

Therefore, the Technology was more about Delivery. While the Science was increasingly Speculative, rather than Explanatory.

And, the surprising thing was that these two cores were increasingly made subordinate to any Mathematical Relations that had been fitted-up to measured data sets, acquired by these two sets of Experts, who had somehow to work together.

But, in watching a recent historical account on YouTube, put together by Gareth Samual (See the Pattern), where his stepping stones to a Theory of the Ether were always the Equations resulting from the various theoretical investigations - always "validated" only by successful predicted use. But, literally NONE of them were correct, and Samuel explained that effective predictions could be achieved with formulae, in which as many as 20 different constants had been included, yet they had NO real physical determinators within Concrete Reality, and were merely only "adjusted-to-fit"!

Also in Drummett's extended piece upon Frege, he frequently referred to Logic as both Absolute-and-Given, which, most certainly it isn't!

So, the question arises, "Exactly where was that System of Reasoning originally established absolutely" - which without any doubt, was supposedly achieved in the Greek Intellectual Revolution, of the 5th Century BC, where it defined the elements of Euclidian Geometry as:

Absolute Relational Abstractions

which it was intended only to apply to these very unusual types of relational entities, which are certainly NOT the case generally in All Reasoning, and most certainly NOT the only ones used in what he calls Logic!

 

 

Culture and Revolution

 Originally posted here 8th April 2020

As culture shifts across the globe workers are beginning to realise their importance and power again - but can this be harnessed against the Capitalist class which exploit them?

Building an effective opposition within the Neo-Con, post-industrial societies 

David Harvey, in a recent Democracy-at-Work offering, once again, with his usual eminently Marxist analysis, and profound cultural understanding, finds it necessary to dramatically switch the emphasis that the Left must take, in order to effectively combat the results of 40 years of Neo-Con Capitalism, which have clearly effectively de-unionised and de-politicised the Working Class Movements in Countries like the UK and the USA.

Now, there is a lot wrong with the TV series The Sixties (currently broadcasting on Sky in the UK), BUT, nevertheless, it does reveal much of that crucial tumultuous decade which prepared the ground for the later Neo-Con transformation of World Capitalism, which by the 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan, was beginning to dismantle the traditional Working Class oppositional politics with the systematic destruction of its historical strengths within organised Labour, and, in the USA, the Cold War effective annihilation of all the Political Parties of the Left!

Yet France, with its Gilet Jaune Left Populism, and the current joint action with the still existing Unions' own General Strike, is demonstrating what can be done in favoured areas. And a single major crack in the Neo-Con System, still not recovered from the 2008 Economic Collapse, could this time precipitate an unrecoverable Crisis from the Capitalists point of view!

(Editor: the current worldwide health / economic crisis, for example)


The Socialist Agenda

But, the usual separation of major campaigns of "The Sixties", and the lack of a Socialist Party backing them all, guaranteed failure in spite of the remarkable numbers often involved.

BUT with a Common Socialist Agenda, and a combined fight, and, a concerted effort to prevent the always agitated-for separation of campaigns, which will always and inevitably oppose this necessary aim, and the "Please Everybody" demand from them.

It must be countered, by making the disenfranchised ex-Working Class the only reliable source for Real Change on every single front.

(Editor: they can no longer hide from the vital role 'key workers' play in keeping the whole system going)

And, within that sector, the major Class Objective will be in providing a Young Socialist Movement for the discarded Youth - just as we did successfully in the 1960s with the Labour Party's Young Socialists. That youth will thrill their de-classed elders, and energise the whole undertaking, as the introduction of the Youth did in the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties in the USA!

The Left needs a Socialist Party committed to literally all campaigns, but always unified by socialist solutions, and energised by a commitment to Working Class youth, with activities and facilities concentrated upon where those Youth are, yet mobilising them as the spearhead!

And, contradictably, NOT seeking the support of the Educated or the Middle Class, while at the same time delivering the very best informed and well explained Theory. But allowing NO exclusions of our generalist demands, and the very best organisation when under attack!

Without such a unifying participation, individual campaigns will quickly rise, and just as quickly fall. So, every single action or strike must be immediately supported, not just with individual participators. but with banners expressing both support and Socialist demands.

And, demonstrations, no matter how small, and a march directly to support the fight, with food, and collections of money arranged for the fighters, from Working Class Estates, accompanied with the most vigorous chants and energy!

Re-building History?

Adam Curtis stitches together an array of extraordinary archive film footage in Can't Get You Out of My Head

Re-Building the Real History &

Organisation of a Required Class Consciousness

There is a current on-going series of films on the BBC (Can't Get You Out of My Head), which far from being politically radical, is actually in concert with that station's News Programmes, and much of its General Content across the whole range of genres, from Drama to all other types of entertainment, are purposely working increasingly hard to either instil-into, cajole, bully or merely influence its listeners and viewers, into a hopeless and increasingly cowed state of accepting that all of the mounting calamities besetting them, at present, are entirely of their own selfish making, and actually natural built-in weaknesses within themselves.

But this isn't True!

Even the total dishonesty and complete incompetence of the Tory Government, led by Boris Johnson, is NEVER revealed by the media for what it is, and what they are trying to impose both physically-and-blame-wise by allowing to pile up, all the agonies of their OWN mishandling, into a slowly-but-surely drift into putting most of the blame upon the people themselves.

Even, any "good policies", are never carried through to a satisfactory conclusion, because they were really always only gestures, included in order to con ordinary Working People into thinking that the Government has their best interests at heart, while, in fact, always-and-ever getting things back to having the money once again rolling into the pockets of the Wealthy - their pockets: with every one back at work - preferably on lower wages, and inferior working conditions, and, if possible, well-separated from each other, rather than working together, where their natural Class Consciousness would be mutually generated once again!

Though the powers-that-be may seem to be failing, we have to clearly acknowledge just how the seemingly tumultuous mess, is, in fact, dramatically changing the forms, conditions and remuneration of employment or benefits for most workers, to significantly minimise the possibility of collective action by Workers to defend and even extend their circumstances.

And with the demise of the Unions and genuine Working Class Political Parties, the once possible means are no longer available. JUST when they are needed most!

So, they have to be replaced in a wholly new way, by using any still-extent Democracy, but now legitimately extended, well beyond the rare occasions when Ballot boxes are involved - to Public Meetings, initially addressing local issues, in the current Crisis, with decisions by Culminating Votes, along with actual organisational arrangements, to effectively carry them out! And, selected enforcers - subject to Instant-Recall-and-Replacement, if they are not carrying out the democratically-arrived-at will of the majority in such meetings.

Much earlier in this health crisis (in 2020) I published a series of papers urging that the organised response needed to be in the hands of such local democratic structures, for doing the basic jobs nest, and putting any National organisation into the empowered hands of the NHS, bypassing the Tories biased structures, and installed "leaderships"!

And all that would have been incomparably better than what actually ensued.

I will now re-issue these papers again herewith, to allow The People to make THEIR Judgments as to what should happen NOW!

What is the Philosophy of Mathematics?

 

Worlds created from abstractions are virtual, not real

What is Mathematics?

And what is its Relationship to Reality?

I have been looking for satisfactory answers to the questions above for sometime - none are forthcoming! Having just watched a couple of lecture videos on Youtube - one by Ray Monk on The Philosophy of Mathematics and another via Google Talks by a Dr. Stephens on Emmie Noether, my question (posed by the title to this paper), that literally demands to be addressed, remains unanswered. It was needed to clear up exactly where Reality-as-is terminates, and the products of Human Thinking, both claim to take over and intervene, by Reversing-the-Process, and beginning instead to contribute to the actual defining of "A Reality" via man-made Purely Formal Relational System!

The Ray Monk video

Indeed, though not admitted as such, that actual change was one of the unavoidably Key Products of the Greek Intellectual Revolution of the 5th century BC, when a successful attempt to do precisely that was actually made possible by their invention-and-use of certain

Simplifying Relational Abstractions

applied to concretely impossible, yet mathematically essential relations, between such things as:

               

- Points with zero parts

- Lines with zero thickness 

- Planes with zero depth

For it was these abstractions, and these alone, that made Mathematics possible, by restricting the whole exercise, with such transforming physical constraints: that they also made all subsequent relations in that discipline to become Forever Fixed in quality! Everything was made, by these changes, to conform to an essential

Principle of Plurality

- but though easy to validly insist upon, within the Realm of Pure Forms alone, it was wholly impossible to apply in Concrete Reality-as-is! So, when usefully applied to "such a Reality", that too, ALSO just had to be majorly-constrained to deliver only such necessarily-Fixed-Relations- achieved by forcibly-limiting the situation involved, into a rigidly-constrained Stability - indeed, into a guaranteed Pluralist Situation, to enable Mathematics to be effectively-used.

Therefore: Reality is NOT revealed by Mathematics!

Reality has to be made to conform to our abstractions.

However, such seemingly-unchanging Stabilities can occur naturally, and often do if only temporarily, AND, in addition, man-made Pluralist Stabilities were often fairly easy to both construct-and-maintain: the consequently extract Pluralist Laws, from both such contexts, were then further-assumed to be the Natural Truth, but usually often hidden under many overlying and masking extras. 

So, this major and false inversion, promoted Pluralist Laws as the "Actual Truths of Reality", and material Reality-as-is was demoted into becoming "a misleading fiction"! And, consequently, all arranged-for situations in Production, which obeyed those Pluralist Laws, were wrongly seen as exposing the "Real Underlying Reality" of the natural world.

But that isn't True!

Also, all insertions algebraically, from one Pluralist Law into another different one, are totally illegitimate! The whole universally-established Method of Mathematical Rationality as a means-of-extending these discoveries into a comprehensive valid discipline, are also totally mistaken when dealing with Reality-as-is.

But, Mathematical Plurality was universally employed because it validly enabled a whole and successful means of implementing a totally reliable Method of achieving Successful Consequential Productions, merely by breaking the Production Process down into a series of separate individual stages, each with its own physical restrictions and consequent Pluralist Laws!

And paired with the longtime-prior, pragmatist legitimiser of "If it works, it is right!" the New Approach vastly-enlarged what could possibly be done: for the new system was a truly major advance over what it replaced! And, it even encouraged the beginnings of a possible alternative and Causal Approach, with added-in possible notions of exactly why things behaved as they did.

Though the two sets of ideas did not mesh at all well, and Causal Explanations were never an integrated part of the Main System! Explanations provided merely a helpful accompanying narrative. And, any really-attempted causal explanations were restricted only to limited areas of study, which were naturally much closer to Pluralist situations, always due to these sustained periods of "Stability" (which could last millions of years, admittedly) as were evident in the Night Sky of the Heavens!

So, it is not surprising that such an evident conducive Tail would wag the confusing real Dog, and put the usually defeating nature of most of Reality as being due entirely to the large number of different active contributions overlying the hidden significant determinators! So, one way of "revealing" the "main determinator" in a not-too-complex system, would be to purposely-suppress all the "inessentials", and so completely reveal the underlying "main cause".

Science was deliberately converted into a wholly Pluralist Discipline, via Mathematics and pragmatism, because in such arranged-for situations, wholly successful productions were always possible, proving the value of the approach: though, of course, it could not lead to a successful integrated Theoretical System on the natural world - indeed a real Science- but only Technologies, involving many separate, achievable Contributing Productions, but NO integrated-and-cerebly-developable Theory.

Indeed, it is correct to insist that, at best, Mathematics can only deliver a partial Reflection of the Reality it seems to deliver, but simultaneously it can, in addition, deliver a whole collection of related features, BUT ONLY from elsewhere in the involved realm, where Mathematics legitimately reigns- that is within Ideality!

Indeed, Ideality, being only a Conceptual World of Pure Forms alone, enables Mathematics, but NOT Reality, to be infinitely extended! Many of the extensions to Mathematics, brought in to "explain" features of Reality that Plurality fails to deal with, are also totally illegitimate in Reality-as-is, so can tell us Absolutely Nothing: they seem not to exist anywhere in concrete Reality.

Maybe I should mention a few of these, in case you are in doubt!

How about Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Quantum Entanglement, Multiple Universes, The Uncertainty Principle, The Heat Death of the Universe, The Big Bang, Initial Inflation, Infinite Expansion, Normalisation, and many, many more!

But many of the real problems caused by the Illusions of Plurality, can be compounded in various different ways: and perhaps the most important ones are those caused by the mistakes of Plurality, but complicated by the formulaic simplifications caused by substitutions from one pluralist equation into another, because, once two, or more equations have been merged in this way, the result will certainly NOT be delivered by using that combined Form, as the concrete result is never a single process, but still a simultaneous set of mutually effecting processes.

For though we have made a combined single Formula, in Reality such will still be individual processes competing for resources and producing outputs into a general pool of consequent resources, once again to be competed for. Yet, the original amounts of the various components now being lost in the new and different pool!

And the algebraically arrived-at formula cannot in any way mirror what is holistically going on in material Reality. 

And, to complicate things even further, apart from being essential resources, when each process proceeds separately, many secondary products from one process can and will affect another when all happening together: and these will be totally unknown from the wholly separate cases that delivered the supposedly contributing processes... 

A New Kind of Science?

... 

A Critique of - and Alternative to - Stephen Wolfram's

 "New Kind of Science"

With his computer software products of the last 30 years - solely based upon Cellular Automata - Stephen Wolfram builds, by very simple rules, certain surprisingly complex patterns. He compares them with the Binary 1s and 0s in Computing Machine Code where they are used to emulate a whole range of complex systems, that he and the Computing community have developed to a remarkable degree. But here, involving only Black and White identical squares, which via the "Wolfram Language", he has suggested a further, "more basic-and-abstract" set of Software developments, which, he insists, transcend all the anomalies-and-contradictions of the two currently dominant theories in Physics, such as those delivered by both Relativity Theories on the one hand, and Quantum Theories, on the other.

For, he insists that the far-more-basic study of all the results involved in his new kind of simple abstracted elements, are very different from those currently subscribed-to in those "Fundamental Theories" mentioned above. And, to that same end, he has also produced a "Wolfram-based" piece of software, incorporating, in addition, an extensive Knowledge Base, and possible direct access to its solutions, when posed with obviously relevant questions typed into it.

BUT, (and this is most important) he nowhere in his "New Science" addresses any of the causes inherent in those usually Subscribed-to-Areas of Theory and Knowledge, which have always been wholly dependant, ever since the Greek Intellectual Revolution, absolutely solely upon the artificial Rationality of Mathematics.

This foundation was possible due to an invention I have dubbed Simplified Relational Abstractions.

These abstractions were very effective, and have been used ever since, but they are true only in the relationships between Fixed Pure Forms, that always exist only in Forever Fixed Relations to one another (Laws or Rules), and therefore could alone be used, via Theorems and their Proofs, using that unique Mathematical Rationality, which, in order to work at all, just had to conform exactly to The Principle of Plurality.

But Plurality was not, and never can be true, of literally all other Reasoning, which instead must conform to the Principle of Holism, in which all "Laws" or "Rules" eventually vary, and such qualitative changes have to be the sole-means of Rationality, used in tracing out the only possible qualitative changes. Purely quantitative changes can never deal with such areas, and they will definitely include both General Reasoning, and ALL of The Sciences too, for all natural reality evolves and changes over time unless we try and stop it doing so. 

Now, though Plurality can-and-will approximate to Reality within Effectively Stabilised Situations, they are never, as is usually assumed - The Natural Norm of Reality. They are instead actually only temporary, if occasionally very long-lasting interludes, which will always terminate as the nexus of mutually-supporting-factors, are ultimately always and naturally successfully challenged. All Real Qualitative Development simply MUST, and indeed WILL, only conform to Holism.

At the same time as the Ancient Greeks were settling upon Plurality as the means for studying reality, in India - majorly influenced by The Buddha - they were settling instead upon Holism, as the rational Basis of all Reasoning, AND crucially all Development too! But, of course, both of these conceptions were, at that time, inadequately defined, as Mankind was, in both cases, breaking wholly new ground, and as with all such "Incomplete Understanding", it will always turn out to be less-than-sufficient, to include all the relevant factors.

Indeed, a crucial tenet of Modern 21st Century Holism, stresses the unavoidable multifarious basis of all Reality-as-is, as being inevitably composed of many different-yet-simultaneous factors - all of which do NOT just SUM, but actually affect one-another continually and qualitatively.

So, Causality in Fixed-Law Plurality, and hence also in Wolfram's identically philosophically-based stance, all fixed Rules are either ON or OFF, and can only Quantitatively SUM, when acting simultaneously with other Pluralist Laws. 

However, in Holism which more accurately represents how physical reality behaves, a huge variety of interactions are possible - all of which can change-each-other in various ways. While overall - taking all of them together, actually produce a range of diverse, consequent Phases, depending upon the weights, but also crucially the kinds, of the influences involved. The crucial thing about Plurality, is that the Laws cannot change qualitatively, and, as such, remain fixed no matter what the containing circumstances are.

But, the same cases within Holism, because of their mutually modifying effects, infer an almost continuous variation in how they all act: including, once changed, how they then react-back-upon what changed them, and, indeed, change that too, in consequence! You are bound, therefore, to get both Recursion, and even the ultimate appearance of the Wholly New: where it WILL, in such circumstances, also be the Emergence of total Novelty - real Qualitative Development is therefore not only possible, but inevitable - and this is reflected in the dynamic reality we observe.

Now, additionally, there will also be actual contention- indeed sometimes all the way to processes producing the Direct Opposites of other processes. And the amount of such opposition, will vary in various ways from effectively Ignorable in one direction, all the way to Total Cancellation, with neither process NOT having any effect, on to the Total Dominance of one over the other (and all states in between these distinctive Phases). And Recursion will also guarantee that the many modifying Effects will "in sum" create constant variations in literally everything, though itself will be adjusted by the sizes of the differently-acting Opposites.

Now, in such a melée, it seems inevitable that very long-lasting Stabilities could, and occasionally would, be totally impossible, but that turns out to be incorrect! Indeed, when the above relations, all acting together, work themselves out, a kind of Balanced Stability is achieved, with the diametrically opposite processes controlling groups of situations into constantly varying, yet effectively "constant" results by a built-in entire controlling into a "Negating Balance of Opposites", which whenever an unbalancing commences, quite mechanistically also varies what will change it back in the opposite direction: though all such operations occur over very short time-spans.

Interestingly, these "Balanced Stabilities" are NEVER permanent, and in rare Crisis Situations, can and indeed do, carry on into overall avalanches of collapses of all the Balanced Stabilities into a total Dissolution of the overall System of them, into what appears to be Total Chaos! The name usually applied to these situations when we observe them in society, is a Revolution, but similar patterns are observable in natural development too - and its following resolution into a New System of balanced stabilities, if such occurs, is termed philosophically, an Emergence.

Stephen Wolfram

Now, all of these criticisms of Plurality, also apply equally well to Wolfram's new alternative Science: so it is certainly no solution to the myriad problems associated with the Pluralist Stance - the well-beloved mathematical view - and the crisis it has precipitated in Physics.

So, now, we must begin to adequately equip a genuinely New Kind of Science - based resolutely in a New Holism - as the old historical version of holistic thinking is, as yet, ill-equipped for the necessary task of solving Science's philosophical inadequacies. 

We dealt with some possible new Holistic approaches in the last issue of SHAPE Journal - Circles, Spirals and Helices

Now, both the problems, and the virtues, of the Holist Stance arise from its maximal variability! For, without any Stable Waystations being available within its Reasoning, all Explanations get turned into different seemingly Infinite Regressions. So, there have to be both Processes and consequent achieveable Waystation States, wherein reasonably "long-lasting Interludes of Relative Stability are achievable, where in, in some cases at least, the old pluralist methods could still be used within the achieved Temporary Stabilities. BUT, it could never extend to predicting those States' guaranteed terminations, and, crucially, what they would then be replaced by. Indeed, ALL Qualitatuive Changes are totally beyond Plurality!

So, even in the best of circumstances, the actual trajectory of all Development is always unavoidably due to a kind of ever-present Blind Holism - it can never describe exactly what you will get in such Holistic Changes! But, Reality is never in a single Universe-wide State. It is inevitably structured as a Hierarchy of Levels, and within those Levels of Further separate Localities - all ruled by Holism, but everywhere attaining temporary interludes of Stability - both achieved, maintained and ultimately terminated along with its temporarily "stable states".

Let us begin to investigate just how these are achieved!

Here again we must approach "Circles, Spirals and Helices", because it is never in single instances that qualitatively changed Compositions, and, therefore caused flips to alternate States, are thereby achieved: it can only happen in constantly repeated Cycles of Processes, which, alone, can over-time dramatically change compositions, and hence ultimately precipitate Wholly New Outcomes. Indeed, such changes, initially, have negligible effects: but, nevertheless, they will be affecting many different simultaneous processes - to different extents - until the whole system flips-over into a series of different modes, each of which, either settle into a self-adjusted relatively stable state, or precipitate an overall collapse into a major Qualitative Change!

The Cyclic Nature of the System, both "steadies the boat", in one sense, by briefly returning to previous conditions, but also ensures Cumulative Build-Ups, that take the System to Wholly New Circumstances. The multi-factor nature of these Cyclic Systems is governed by the multiple simultaneous interactions, which can both steady things, or alternatively build-up to destructive proportions.

It is the former of these two alternatives that usually dominates, and ensures that the situation remains stable most of the time - look at the cyclical stabilities of atoms, metabolic pathways, ecosystems, orbits in planetary systems and the fusion reactions in stars. These recurrent stabilities throughout nature allow us to use Plurality and Mathematics to understand their forms, but we understand nothing about their underlying dynamics, lifespans or origins. 

These cyclical stabilities boil down to the unavoidable Causal Dominance of Diametrical Opposites: for ONLY these can oppose their opposites, entirely cancel their effects, and maybe even precipitate their individual domination or even demise!

Now, these latter paragraphs reflect the very different Nature of Holistic interactions. They not only differ from the usual Pluralistic Causality, but can actually take different consequent and even diametrically opposite paths. So, there is a great deal more to it, than I have inferred here.

Holistic Rationality is still in its infancy, and that also means that Holistic Science (especially in subjects like Physics), is practically non-existent! We see its origins in the Dialectical Materialism of Karl Marx, both in History and in Capitalist Economics, but even that took Marx the rest of his life to just begin the process, AND even in those areas it has to be constantly updated with new study, for nothing we discover is fixed like in Mathematics, everything constantly evolves!


ASIDE:

I cannot let this important passage pass, without describing its relationship to "Balanced Stabilities". For these are the Holistic Equivalents of all the Supposedly Basic, and potentially-permanent Stabilities in Plurality.

But, of course, they are in fact the very Opposite of Basic, and are, somehow, actively-maintained as Stable (presumably via the cumulative effects of processes in Repeating Cycles), which usually effectively eliminate all destructive contributions by the ever increasing successes of Pairs of Diametrical Opposites, not only selectively eliminating all others, but also, settling into whole sets of Balanced Pairs of opposites, acting as self-adjusting maintainers of the achieved Overall Stability.

Now, the switches, from absolutely NO causally-explained Qualitative changes, as in all Pluralist Science, is still not universally accepted, as most scientists actually recognise such changes, but either totally fail to explain what causes them, and/or just signal-and-describe, rather than explain, the occurrence of such changes, by merely noting-when the exceeding of a previously observed and thereafter known threshold occurs, and the consequent switching to a different behaviour then happens, without any explanation for that change in the Science.

Clearly, this tells us nothing: but such was the established norm, with the various behaviours considered to be adequately described by mathematical equations - that have been fitted-up to measured values from experiments, and both dominated by, and sufficient for, Effective Pragmatic Use (or Technology) only, but often with little or no explanation of Reality (or Science).

The "use-tail" therefore always wagged the "explanatory dog"!

And with the dexterity of Human Hands, tool-making and the development of our intelligence, even that had been sufficient to transform their World and Lives truly significantly! With the gains of the Greek Intellectual Revolution, Humanity would continue to do so for still more millennia.

But a New Approach (as yet undefined) was even then, clamouring-at-the-Door! It was the need for a deeper Understanding of our world, and therefore Real Explanation of its mysterious and dynamic nature. Now there had been many failed attempts to do this in human history, via Magic, Chance, Religion or even the Plans of Great or Wise Leaders, but what was already becoming possible were the emerging means of investigating aspects of Reality - in order to really Understand them - not the Technology which took over, but Science itself!

But the steadfast commitment to Plurality was already deflecting attention, even then, into only Fixed Laws limited to constrained contexts: and the vast majority of Causal Systems were not Pluralistic at all! So what began to be discovered were individual Laws, within rigidly-maintained circumstances, but never how those limitations and their necessarily Fixed Laws could be transcended, which was still causally unknown!

Two millennia ago, The Buddha was already developing an alternative approach, which later became known as Holism: and slowly the dynamics of Natural Qualitative Change began to be attempted to be addressed by human beings - but still not yet via a developed System of proven ideas, though, initially, at least, by continuing re-assessments and occasional profound Thought - and always available for improvement.

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2017/06/oh-my-gosh-its-covered-in-rule-30s/

But, in Science, that approach was minimally developed because of the Pluralist Myth that absolutely everything can be adequately addressed by Fixed Laws alone. They most certainly cant!And, what is almost entirely undeveloped in Physics, for example, are the Dynamical Emergences of Qualitative Changes, as causally explained phenomena.

Yet that is absolutely imperative, if Science is to form a basis for most Reliable Understanding: and we must start with how they work within recurring processes as in Cycles, as in Orbits and in Spins.

With the one-off occurrence of an effect, qualitative changes are likely to be small and soon swamped by a cascade of other very different ones. But, in constantly repeated, seemingly-identical cycles, such changes can, and indeed often do, accumulate into an ever growing Effect, which can ultimately become dominant, and flip the whole situation into a different mode! Now, such things can literally never happen with Fixed Pluralist Singly-happening Laws: but, with collections of multiple, different and simultaneous Holistic sets of Laws, particularly in repeated Cycles, they could be very likely indeed.

But, such changes within an Holistic set of laws can do several very different things! They can establish temporary Stabilities for long periods. Aberrations can cause the total collapse of such a Stability. Cycles can selectively eliminate aberrations in Systems. They can allow Qualitative Changes in Real Development. 

And, as the common form of "Stability" in a Holistic World, it is only ever temporarily delivered within a Balanced Stability of many laws - linked Laws primarily in Balanced Pairs of Diametrical Opposites, such aberrations though similarly ineffectual singly, are on the contrary, within constantly repeated Cycles, highly likely to grow, for though normally singly eliminated by the self-adusting Pairs, which can usually overcome a single aberration, they will, on the contrary, be highly susceptible within constantly repeated identical Cycles, so such aberrations can then accumulate over many repeats, which can in some circumstances even precipitate a complete dissolution of the system - not only of single Balanced Pairs, but could, along with others, dissociate an entire Balanced Stability.

In an Holistic situation Formal Logic doesn't hold! 

But it is still Causal!

Many simultaneous causes contend!

You have to reveal The Whole Mix!

But, notice that, because any diametrical opposites will mutually-cancel, they will not be easily eliminated: on the other hand, less related and thereby balanced-and-maintained components, will instead be selectively-eliminated over the constant, successive repeats of the ongoing Cycles - to leave only the more retainable content over time!


ASIDE:

The Nature of Modern Holism, not appreciated until very recently, now involves very different dynamic scenarios to those of the usual Pluralist Stance, because the simultaneous interactions of multiple contending and modifying factors, are now seen to involve a whole range of different outcomes, that were wholly inconceivable previously in Plurality.

Indeed, even The Tetralemma, as mentioned in the writings of many Buddhist Philosophers, that listed the 4 conceivable judgements, that cover all the possible applicabilities of such ideas - indeed that they can be

True

or Untrue,

both True & Untrue,

or neither True or Untrue

- instead of being only absolutely unexplained Descriptions, are now each capable of being covered by a series of rational explanations for the first time.

And the initial places these began to become possible were in changing contents and ultimately outcomes of constantly repeated Cycles!

Now, this development has already precipitated an alternative to the usual Pluralist Theories dominating current Cosmology: as they have led to a rejection of the usual Theories particularly concerned with the Origin and Subsequent Development of the Whole Universe. Indeed, all sorts of extensions to Reality are referred-to, in compiling current explanations in this significant area of ideas, actually taking most of them well beyond Reality and Deep into the heart of Ideality!

Yet, the sort of possibilities now being revealed concerning Natural Electricity and Magnetism, are not only providing a fully-explicable "Non-Big-Bang" beginning to Everything, and thereby not only providing an alternative initial primarily Electromagnetic Origin, but also delivering the best chance, today for a Nuclear Fusion means of providing Electricity in the near Future, with the efforts of Eric Lerner and his Fusion Focus team in New Jersey, USA!

So, a major New Intellectual Revolution is at least nigh, if not already underway, which will change literally every aspect of our Philosophy and Culture, if carried-through to completion, or their ultimate demise if not.

Now this paper commenced with the proposed alternative deep mathematical abstractions of Stephen Wolfram, but in taking this new Holistic Route to Understanding has expounded the real way forwards, while also demonstrating the truly vast, indeed Infinite extent of Ideality, that seduces with its detail, but nevertheless leads Mankind only into the Swamps of Myth!

There is a New Kind of Science on the way, but it isn't Wolfram's.

Science must break free of Mathematics and Pluralist thinking to deal head-on with the dynamic, evolving, material and Holist Universe we actually inhabit, for the first time.

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!

 

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. 

Culture and Revolution

As culture shifts across the globe workers are beginning to realise their importance and power again - but can this be harnessed against the Capitalist class which exploit them?

Building an effective opposition within the Neo-Con, post-industrial societies 

David Harvey, in a recent Democracy-at-Work offering, once again, with his usual eminently Marxist analysis, and profound cultural understanding, finds it necessary to dramatically switch the emphasis that the Left must take, in order to effectively combat the results of 40 years of Neo-Con Capitalism, which have clearly effectively de-unionised and de-politicised the Working Class Movements in Countries like the UK and the USA.

Now, there is a lot wrong with the TV series The Sixties (currently broadcasting on Sky in the UK), BUT, nevertheless, it does reveal much of that crucial tumultuous decade which prepared the ground for the later Neo-Con transformation of World Capitalism, which by the 1980s, with Thatcher and Reagan, was beginning to dismantle the traditional Working Class oppositional politics with the systematic destruction of its historical strengths within organised Labour. and, in the USA, the Cold War effective annihilation of all the Political Parties of the Left!

Yet France, with its Gilet Jaune Left Populism, and the current joint action with the still existing Unions' own General Strike, is demonstrating what can be done in favoured areas. And a single major crack in the Neo-Con System, still not recovered from the 2008 Economic Collapse, could this time precipitate an unrecoverable Crisis from the Capitalists point of view!

(Editor: the current worldwide health / economic crisis, for example)


The Socialist Agenda

But, the usual separation of major campaigns of "The Sixties", and the lack of a Socialist Party backing them all, guaranteed failure in spite of the remarkable numbers often involved.

BUT with a Common Socialist Agenda, and a combined fight, and, a concerted effort to prevent the always agitated-for separation of campaigns, which will always and inevitably oppose this necessary aim, and the "Please Everybody" demand from them.

It must be countered, by making the disenfranchised ex-Working Class the only reliable source for Real Change on every single front.

(Editor: they can no longer hide from the vital role 'key workers' play in keeping the whole system going)

And, within that sector, the major Class Objective will be in providing a Young Socialist Movement for the discarded Youth - just as we did successfully in the 1960s with the Labour Party's Young Socialists. That youth will thrill their de-classed elders, and energise the whole undertaking, as the introduction of the Youth did in the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties in the USA!

The Left needs a Socialist Party committed to literally all campaigns, but always unified by socialist solutions, and energised by a commitment to Working Class youth, with activities and facilities concentrated upon where those Youth are, yet mobilising them as the spearhead!

And, contradictably, NOT seeking the support of the Educated or the Middle Class, while at the same time delivering the very best informed and well explained Theory. But allowing NO exclusions of our generalist demands, and the very best organisation when under attack!

Without such a unifying participation, individual campaigns will quickly rise, and just as quickly fall. So, every single action or strike must be immediately supported, not just with individual participators. but with banners expressing both support and Socialist demands.

And, demonstrations, no matter how small, and a march directly to support the fight, with food, and collections of money arranged for the fighters, from Working Class Estates, accompanied with the most vigorous chants and energy!

Great Evolutionary Transitions

How should we interpret the Geological Record?

This lecture by Neil Shubin, at Berkley California, is mainly concerned with the key transitions in Devonian Period rock depositions, and thereby gives a clear, if overall, trajectory for the evolutionary line, which ultimately led to land animals from lobe-finned fishes.

Although this is a remarkable piece of work - based mainly upon found fossils, it was also supported by examples of currently-living animals in similar transitional states - BUT, of course, it could never reflect either the multiple causal impulses, or the actual varying tempos involved. You can't ever make a totally-revealing movie of reality out of such separated stills!

Indeed, as with all fossil-based scenarios, they can only mark-out individual snapshots along the actually-travelled road from those overall, past trajectories of change, without in any way identifying which caused what, and how it did it. And, consequently, the actual causes and consequent dynamics of actual Evolution, with their necessary alternating interludes of Holistic Balanced Stabilities, and crisis-precipitated Revolutions of dramatic qualitative changes, can never be causally explained with the fossil record as the sole evidence.

The Great Transitions in Evolution by Neil Shubin

For, of course, there still had to be all the usual disadvantages of such evidence, which is reflected in most Science concerned with Development. Limited snapshots are all we have of what in actuality was a dynamic and tumultuous series of multiple qualitative transformations, NONE of which could ever be fully reflected in the data.

NOTE:

Now, elsewhere, this researcher had to design a motion analysis system based upon recorded footage of professional dance performance, which the experienced and expert teacher was attempting to communicate to advanced students. She found the task to be impossible due to the weaknesses of moving film [remember each new still is delivered every 1/25th of a second, and remains there, totally-unchanging for the that duration]. Using analogue video footage instead, she was also stymied by the way a butchered mini-movie was squashed into each individual frame of a video recording (via interlacing) of the very same dance sequence.

Clearly, as with the fossil record in the rocks, it is both a built-in track of the prior history of such a movement, along with, a similar track of its subsequent future developments would also be necessary. But because evidence from every moment within the frame-time, and from all positions within the frame's-extent were available, the video footage had much more of the movement's dynamic quality than the film. Yet every part of the frame was unavoidably blurred!

So, in order to effectively use both versions, they would have to be superimposed, in such a way as to very clearly deliver the best of both: and in achieving this for dance, with overlaid history and future both-building-and-fading animations of positions on top of the video, the correct interpretation of the studied movements was successfully achieved!

Andy Denzler's video glitch paintings

However a similar temporal solution is not possible in Geology, as no alternative dynamical record can possibly be available to correct the sequences of stills in the fossil record alone.

The crucial causes for such changes are never evident, and the easiest interpretations are always both distortingly simplifying and invariably erroneous.

What else could it possibly be, when unavoidably-interpreted by the actual still-sequemces of the always inadequate historical development of the Understanding by Mankind over several millennia? It is not only the nature of the evidence but, crucially, also the historical inadequacies of Human thinking throughout that period too.

And, that approach was consequentially determined by the unavoidable, natural inadequacies in the Philosophy of Mankind, which was never a given of their own evolution.

Man has had to slowly develop that Philosophy, via a series of more or less inadequate stages, as his wider and deeper experiences gradually delivered the wherewithal to achieve a series of improvements within it.

Now, of course, Science has been a primary contributor to that development, but it can still, at best, only reflect the limitations of its own revealed content.

And, most significant of all, the most hidden, yet vital, episodes in all development occur at such tempos that they are too slow to be physically experienced, yet too fast to be available in the fossil evidence, always reflecting truly vast intervals of time, via quite meagre depositions, while always being a very tiny proportion of what actually existed then, and which, by chance, is still available now.

There is always a parallel consideration to be made, along with the gathered evidence, which is the current state of Human Understanding generally - indeed the philosophical level of development of the human interpreters.

And, ever since the first significant intellectual stirrings, with the Ancient Greeks, the major-and-damning omissions have always been to do with the Dynamics of Qualitative Change. The universally-applied Principle of Plurality, derived from early Mathematics, was also wrongly-applied to both Formal Reasoning and then later to Science. But, Plurality sees Reality as-only-changing-incrementally - that is quantitatively, and sees this as being due to eternal and unchanging laws.

It wasn't until Hegel, only a mere 200 years ago, that Qualitative Change was considered to occur in Human Thinking, and led to his important developments within Reasoning, which he termed Dialectics. And, though Karl Marx realised that Hegel's discoveries were relevant in concrete Reality too, and saw their application to the Sciences as absolutely vital - that, in fact, did not happen, and has only begun to be applied in the last decade, by as yet only a meagre few investigators. 

And Shubin is not yet among them!

But, such a long delay was, indeed, unavoidable, as the pluralist inadequacies, of the then current thinking, turned those studies, first, into various "Supposedly Different Subjects", and, thereafter, even within those "Subjects" into descrete "Specialisms". So, the wherewithal to address those difficulties were generally once again unavailable to allow such necessary developments.

Interestingly, this professional physicist, looking for a way out of the current Crisis in Physics, was getting nowhere, until he was involved in the above research to wed Multimedia to the teaching of Dance Performance and Choreography.

Believe it or not, in solving this problem, I had to deviate, for some time, into an absolutely crucial detour into Philosophy (which, fortunately, solved my impasse in Physics too!)

The same problems will certainly also be true, for the very able Palaeontologists involved in the Evolutionary Transition studies referred to above.

For, what was finally revealed in all major Qualitative Changes, by the studies in creative Dance Movements, was a remarkably dramatic and tumultuous series of stages, always commencing with Crises within what had been a "Persisting Stability", which increased in intensity, until that Stability totally collapsed, and was followed by a new, this time wholly constructive interlude, which, via many temporary constructional crises, finally coalesced, into a new persisting Stability. And, as you might have guessed, reactive, expressive movement delivers the epitome of such changeovers, within its transitions, when they are effectively revealed!

The necessary context for the dynamism delivered by the analogue video frames, was supplied by the possibility of extracting precise positions from the digital stills. And then, by a subsequent superimposition of animated-sequence overlays of positions upon the moving video, which delivered precisely what was required, under immaculate Access-and-Control facilities. In effect, these additions extended every moment into a necessarily dynamic duration, providing both glimpses of its immediate history, and subsequent future, to provide what the two kinds of recordings alone could never do.

And, capturing different views, simultaneously, in the same way, and delivering them in synchrony with the front view, when directed by an expert teacher, seemed to deliver the best possible recorded solution.

So the problem for our geologists, is to fit their exemplars into such a trajectory, OR, much more likely into a series of such trajectories. While, of course, remembering that all the many failures in such processes are unlikely to have left the slightest trace.

Now, with my essential detour into analysis of dance movement, before being able to return to the problems in Physics, and Hegel's similar researches in Thinking, to unearth the need to also abandon Plurality in Formal Reasoning - it similarly involved a major investigation into revolutionary changes in History, for Marx to be in a position to analyse the current Capitalist Economics to envisage revolutionary changes there too.

So, for the Palaeontologists to correctly interpret the fossil record, they too will have to, in addition, study Qualitative Changes elsewhere, which occur at a tempo that will allow general valid conclusions to be drawn! For example, it will require a study of current living animals, to import a dialectical understanding to the series of stills that constitutes the fossil record.

An earlier version of this article was published in Special Issue 66 of the SHAPE Journal.