• daltotron@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    Dialectical Materialism is a logical method that looks at matter as a trajectory. Everything is not what it was, the river of yesterday is not the river of today. Everything is changing and nothing is static. Within everything is the element of that which it can change to, ie an apple contains within itself the fuel for it to rot.

    Building on this cause I like the philosophy, and we’re like fifty comments deep so probably nobody will attack me for it. But this is sort of like. The dialectic, here, is the idea that within everything, is the thing which causes it’s own undoing, or, it’s own opposite. Everything exists in a kind of paradoxical state. If you think about old philosophy, it tries to kind of, conceive of fundamental laws which govern everything, and those laws don’t really deal with change. Like those old timey greek philosophies that are like, water composes everything, because water, water can freeze, become solid, water can become liquid, steam, you look upwards into the sky and you see a kind of vast ocean of blue, all life requires water, etc. So it sees water as like this most fundamental of all elements, this kind of, ultimate truth. You get similar stuff with like, the four elements, right, water, earth, air, fire, states of matter. Naturalist philosophy, these philosophies concerned with fundamental truths. Folk philosophy.

    The dialectic is concerned with change. You have the thesis, right, the idea, the truth, that the sky is blue, right. But then within that is the antithesis, the sky is black, right, and I hear you say well no that’s impossible. But then we have the nighttime, the change imposed by time, imposed by the context, sort of. the sky turns from blue to black because of nighttime, and back again in the day. The sky turns red in the evening, the sky turns purple, turns pink, turns green maybe even, and then through that process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, or, sky blue, sky black, sky black and blue, we arrive at truth more generally. We integrate these new realities with our previous realities, we integrate these contradictions, and we arrive at truth. It’s sort of like a basis for the scientific process. You postulate a truth, you go out and attempt to contradict yourself, then you come back in, and change the truth you postulated to fit what it is that you’ve found out in the world. Hopefully, maybe you just do p-value hacking or whatever, I dunno.

    And then at some point the postmodernists come along and fuck everything up for everybody with schizo language games, but nobody has any time for that and I don’t really understand it even though I probably do, because it’s fucked up eldritch shit, so, I won’t get into it unless I’m maybe pressed a little bit. And then there’s like wittgenstein rolling in on a holy chariot, and then dying after he gets thrown off when a rock hits the wheel or something, I dunno.