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Wagner boss Prigozhin killed in plane crash in Russia
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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One more point here, made clearly by Marx, is that understanding how systems shape humans both as individuals and as a society is not de-humanising, it's possibly the most humanising something can be. To be human is to be shaped entirely by your environment and your reactions to it simultaneously, and mass psychology is how we come to have anything remotely psychological to be. It's finding how to live as both a human individual and a human who partakes in, creates, or grows away from mass psychologies. This misunderstanding is exactly Nietzsche hate for the masses. He attempted to understand HIMSELF as not human in this way and create a philosophy around it, while he himself was calling back to individual, anti-change philosophies from the Greeks who did the same (Plato as opposed to Aristotle)
Yes but no. It's dangerous territory, promising both great rewards yet also containing fatal traps: The problem is reducing our own understanding and with that perception of the world to our intellectual understanding. To paint a caricature: When you start to measure mouth angles to figure out whether someone's happy instead of relying on your mirror neurons ("subjective interpretation", cry the Skinnerites). Psychology itself is a very good example here, they legitimately did have to make studies to prove that mood and posture are connected because there were just too many sceptics around with their heads up in their theories, disconnected from their own humanity, their perception of reality having become limited to those theories, not unwilling but unable to see things that don't come with a p value. And that's within psychology itself have a good guess how it's in other disciplines. Not really that relevant in say mathematics, but in economics? As said: Fatal.
Evolution already gave us tools to understand the world. Sure, it also enabled us with rationality, the capacity for science, but to deny that natural understanding is just as bad as shutting off our rationality, it alienates ourselves from our own nature with contains both, in both cases we're incomplete. And for the record: It also provided us with the capacity to mistake social conditioning for actual intuition.
And yes this all is very much the crisis of the millennium but OTOH you shouldn't worry too much evolution already seems to have accounted for it: Skinnerites tend to be unfuckable. That's because they're alienated from their own nature, and that makes you ugly.
There's variance in human psychology that makes individual either more or less prone to move with the flock, or look at it critically, it's a necessary condition for societies to be even half-way functional: With only pure flock swimmers we'd be blindly following each other down cliffs, with only pure critics we'd not be a social species in the first place. And a society made of solely flock swimmers would not develop a critical understanding of psychology in the first place. And when I say "variance" here I very much mean nature, not nurture, nurture in this instance only comes into play if the nature happens to be ambivalent.
Only replying to the first paragraph: you're doing the exact thing I'm describing by defining "intellectual" in an individualized way (you say our, but you're defining it as each individual, not understanding its basis in the collective).
I'm not gonna talk any more because you're not really saying much interesting. You're just defining everything as opposites and not seeing the dialectic between it, but then we're getting to an ages old argument that just results in me saying 'read Hegel' and that's it
Collective understanding is a composite of individual understandings. How the fuck can you make this a contradiction. If (a sufficient number of) individuals make that mistake, then so does the collective. If the collective makes that mistake, then necessarily so do individuals -- or, if they don't, get burned at the stake or banished or ignored or whatever, metaphorically or literally.
I'm not a Hegelian. My theoretical scaffold is generally cybernetics. If you hear me use the term Aufhebung then only because people don't know WTF a metasystem transition is.
There is an inherent contradiction to defining intellectual either as individual or collective, but you're not a Hegelian or a marxist so that's why Im just done with the Convo, it's not interesting because we're not gonna get past that
Which is not what I'm doing? Both individual and collective capacities for thought are part of the overall system, collective both in the societal and species (evolutionary) sense (see bio-psycho-social model).
Cybernetics is one of major tools of the creation of a communist society. That's not me saying that that's the 22nd Congress of the CP of the USSR. The party has decided, comrade, remember your responsibility in the face of democratic centralism! Agree with this random Anarchist!
You act as if cybernetics supersedes basic philosophical presuppositions. Of course I support cybernetic sciences like any other scientific study of systems, but if you think you're doing this independent of an undergirding philosophy you're entirely wrong.
The only difference in the first paragraph is understanding not just that these are parts of a system, but that in practice they define one another directly through their internal contradictions (which are related to each other). Again, you're just an anti-hegelian who thinks you're above defining your own metaphysics.
I also am entirely unconvinced you read either of those articles in their entirety
But I'm not going to convince you here, and my replying is only to you at this point, nobody else will read. So hopefully you read those and try to grasp the underlying philosophy, but I'm out
Which is what systems do when they're in mutual feedback, yes.
Ok you pull me back in, read some philosophy of science which is at the basis of your beliefs here. There are such huge assumptions under the ideas of mutual feedback you're representing here. I'm a Systems Engineer, I get the appeal and genuinely base my scientific analysis of socio economics in the ideas that I've developed through that lens. But I also understand the limitations of this because I've read philosophy of science at the most basic level.
You sound like the people who think that math is a formally complete system and base worldviews on it ("everything is math and we can understand all that happens by the math at the quantum levels and even below eventually") without realizing that the experts of the field are completely against this interpretation, and even claim it's disproven. You're doing intuitionism but I don't think you realize it. I do it too, because it's easiest for understanding and useful, but I know it's limited
No system can be both consistent and complete. Worse, all logical statements are based on either paradox, circular reasoning, or axioms not provable from those statements. And I'm not exactly sure whether you meant that kind of intuitionism (the constructive maths kind) or the "don't discount your intuition" kind but, yes, I very much do both. Both tell us that our models are limited, shadows on the cave wall and all (and it is no coincidence that cybernetics itself models that limitation very nicely). Maths tells us by formal proof, intuition and instincts by incessantly insisting that there's a world outside of our heads, something that refuses to vanish even when we cease to believe in it. It's actually quite a feat to shut that whole thing off, and I constantly wonder how people manage to not run into lamp posts all the time.
Lastly, let me share a nasty shower thought (literally, thought of it this morning in the shower): It would be very anti-Hegelian of you to be fundamentally opposed to the sublation of Hegelian dialectics. I even got quite formal with it (though please don't ask me to write it in Greek), identifying sublation with MSTs. Mull about it.
Hegelian dialectics was possibly sublated by marx, but Marx's dialectic is not a dialectic idea but a material world which does exist as a basic assumption that is perfect for any theory which intends to be useful. You cannot sublate the material world itself. But again, I think that you are under the impression that, because you thought of a quick gotcha, that this hasn't already been thought about and written by many scholars before you. Hegel himself saw this gotcha coming
Nah I'm just confused by the way you reacted to me saying "I'm not a Hegelian", apparently completely dismissing cybernetics as a framework even though it can very much express Hegelian thought. It's not like I said "I'm a seventh day adventist and all your arguments shall be in the form of bible quotes or they're invalid" or something like that.
As far as I am concerned, regarding choice of base formalism other people use: Do whatever. If need be I'll find the corresponding isomorphism in what I'm comfortable with, make the argument, project it back into your formalism, then say it out aloud. Coming to think of it when I put it like this my basic model might actually be category theory. Choice of formalism is very much a matter of convenience, and cybernetics happens to be darn convenient for pretty much everything, and has very important insights of its own to contribute.
I'm not read in Hegel and Hegelians so I'm asking you, do they talk about things like branching growth at the penultimate level following MSTs/sublation? It certainly neatly explains e.g. the increase in number in different erm sects both on the left and right following the initial clashes, in the sense that a sublation already exists and is exerting control, is in the process of getting refined as it is refining the old thesis-antithesis pair by deconstructing both.
(And yes I just called "left unity" anti-Hegelian, deal with it :)
I dismissed cybernetics as a way to supplant the need for an underlying philosophy, which is what you were doing at the beginning. You can study cybernetics and believe it's supported by dialectics, but the other way is nonsense. I am in no way dismissing that MST s are another way to talk about dialectical movements, but it is not dealing with the essence of a thing or that thing in itself at the level of philosophy. Hegelians talk about similar things very often, with a lot of the examples on the pages shown being almost identical in form to things Engels pointed out. But saying you're not a Hegelian (we mean dialectician here, you're likely not a marxist either) indicates to me that our disagreement is not at the level of cybernetics, but at the level of what causes such interactions at all
I'd contend that both are actually the same thing. However that's metaphysics which I have a severe dislike for (as in: it's pointless) so maybe that's why I lump it all up in one thing, and in any case, however that may be: You will find neither of them in any model, anywhere. It's the very nature of a model to not be the thing itself.
I'm quite sure you'll say "yes" when I ask whether you understand the difference between map and territory. Is that understanding you have of that, however, on the level of the map, or on the level of the territory?
Those are the actually tough nuts to crack when rooting models, when fishing for axioms to ground things with. To understand the shape of the wall Plato's shadows get cast on, so that you know how the structure of the wall influences their shape, to be a giant iota closer to understanding.
It would, indeed, be a shame if being a Hegelian meant regressing the "know thyself" aspect to far behind what the Stoics had already figured out in spades.
Is that important? Is it not more important to identify and characterise interactions? Physicists with different beliefs about the ultimate mechanics of quantum uncertainty get along just fine. Personally, as already alluded to with metaphysics, I'm happy to say "yeah whatever causes that, causes that", I have no need or desire for distinctions beyond the measurable.