Comradeship // Freechat

https://www.amazon.com/Dialectical-Biologist-Richard-Levins/dp/067420283X

I can't find an online PDF of it, but you'd like Richard Lewontin. He was an evolutionary biologist and dialectician who wrote a few great books and has some really neat lectures on youtube.

Like Engels originally said, nature is the proof of dialectics. It's extremely relevant in fields like ecology, soil science, horticulture, geology, and geography where you have two parties in a material/social relationship. Predators and prey are a dialectic, plants and soil are a dialectic, rivers and canyons are a dialectic, raccoons and cities are a dialectic. A dialectical understanding of raccoon ecology would involve studying things like:

• the socioeconomic factors that influence their population size, how their population size impacts human health and the desirability of that area, and how human population size impacts the inverse

• the availability of food and habitat on them and how much food they provide for predators

• the ways their social groups form in response to their environment and the way their metabolic activity shapes that environment

• the history of city-raccoon interactions and how that has shaped the evolutionary development of the raccoon, geographic distribution of them, and the societal defenses against them

By the end of that inquiry, you have the most holistic understanding of raccoons situated in their environment possible. When I use it daily in horticulture, I'm considering the full growing environment and social/material/historical/genetic significance of both the plant and land. It's just applying as many angles of analysis as I can and situating both organism and environment in the context of their development.

edit: And the primary difference between dialectical and non-dialectical science isn't idealism so much as it is the Cartesian model where materialist observations are isolated. The river and the canyon can't have a "social" relationship as neither are sentient under a simple understanding of water impacting minerals. The dialectical understanding brings all elements of that environment into the equation. The river shapes the canyon and the canyon influences the hydrology of the river, BUT the river also gets its shape because a surplus of wolves is suppressing the population of elk and they aren't compacting the soil around its banks. The glacier at the headwaters is decreasing the flow because of its dialectic with the atmosphere's dialectic between greenhouse gases and the sun. A dialectician can seamlessly integrate all those things and consider them in an interdisciplinary way between social and material sciences, going as large as the sun and earth or as small as genes and atoms with a sense of continuity.

My experience as a scientist is that to do good science, you need to be thinking dialectically. I think a lot about why more scientists are not Marxists; people who are good at thinking about the interconnectivity and changing nature of things in their science turn to eclecticism in their political beliefs/philosophy. Part of this is that I think we treat science and politics as such disparate things that must never interact.

A lot of the "business" of science is very undialectical, and that's where you see the failures of the field manifest. For example, assessment of a scientist's contributions based on first authorship, journal prestige, etc, encourages bad practices with respect to collaboration and sharing results.

You might enjoy this article by Bernal, a Marxist scientist: https://redsails.org/the-social-function-of-science/

Already we have in the practice of science the prototype for all human action. The task which the scientists have undertaken — the understanding and control of nature and of man himself — is merely the conscious expression of the task of human society. The methods by which this task is attempted, however imperfectly they are realized, are the methods by which humanity is most likely to secure its own future. In its endeavour, science is communism. In science men have learned consciously to subordinate themselves to a common purpose without losing the individuality of their achievements. Each one knows that his work depends on that of his predecessors and colleagues and that it can only reach its fruition through the work of his successors. In science men collaborate not because they are forced to by superior authority or because they blindly follow some chosen leader, but because they realize that only in this willing collaboration can each man find his goal. Not orders, but advice, determine action. Each man knows that only by advice, honestly and disinterestedly given, can his work succeed, because such advice expresses as near as may be the inexorable logic of the material world, stubborn fact. Facts cannot be forced to our desires, and freedom comes by admitting this necessity and not by pretending to ignore it. These things have been learned painfully and incompletely in the pursuit of science. Only in the wider tasks of humanity will their full use be found.

I'm not sure I'd agree that modern science is taught non-dialectically at an advanced level. When studying the human body, you're not studying each organ in isolation (aside from some simplification depending on the level of study). When studying biological evolution, you're not ignoring the material conditions at the time. At some point, you have to draw a line between what is likely relevant and what isn't, because no scientist can have advanced knowledge in every single field

I am not part of the academic community so i want to know how the process of developing knowledge is done as of today, i think we first have to know how it is done as of today.

Things i've noticed hitherto that would be changed with the introduction of dialectics:

• Isolated research is of no use. (nature is connected and determined, a principle of dialectics)
• Peer-review process has to involve experts from a multitude of fields, not just experts on the field. (This would create a need for more interdisciplinary careers).
• IP law has no place in science. Knowledge has to be freely flow and follow up papers have to be encouraged. (nature is state of continuos motion and change, thus there is no end to a study)

Everything has to be revised!

our current outlook on science which is metaphysical.

Metaphysics, coming from the Greek words for "the things after physics," is something that by its etymology is literally outside of science. To understand where you're coming from, you'll need to elaborate on how you're defining "metaphysics" and how your conception of "science in general" is based in it.

By which I don’t mean the scientific method... but science as a whole and as itself.

There is no disentangling the scientific method from the term and our conception of "science." It is the cornerstone of the philosophy, and is inherently dialectical by its nature: it is a process by which a falsifiable (hypo)thesis is pitted against its antitheses through experiment and observation. The synthesis is a new, revised thesis that is again pitted against its antitheses in iteration. Its fruits are a testament to power of dialectics.

As others have noted, bourgeois decision making regarding the application of science does not tend to use dialectical analysis, but that is not unique to "science," and I'm not convinced that the decision making of the bourgeoisie is "metaphysical" in any essential way.

What do you mean by metaphysical? I'm not sure I really understand all the philosophical terms but I've always thought of mainstream science as positivist.

I think physics is currently affected by metaphysics because physicists tend to not see the dialectical relationship between the mathematical formalism of a theory and it's physical interpretation and as such often mistake the former for the latter which cause a lot of problems in the way physics is researched and taught.

For example, the most famous attempt at a "theory of everything" (i.e. uniting relativity and quantum mechanic), string theory, as been hipped up solely on the basis that it works well mathematically while the fact that it completely contradict many of our current physical observations such as its need for more than 3 spatial dimensions is simply hand-waved away with very ad-hoc conjectures such as when string theorists suppose that we don't see their additional dimentions because they are either compactified or because our observable universe in a 3d hyperplane of a higher dimensional space. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for continuing to give it a try, why not, but string theory certainly doesn't deserves its #1 spot as a potential theory of quantum gravity in my opinion, and it's also very sad that other candidates theories are completely overshadowed by it.

It also affect well established theories which end up lacking satisfying physical interpretations despite their success, for example, special relativity despite it's age is still stuck with this very counterintuitive almost mystical sounding interpretation of movement somehow affecting time itself in a way that's not ever really explained even though it is possible to give it a satisfying and even quite intuitive mechanistic interpretation.

I can't answer your question directly but this article may provide some elucidation.