Against Hegelian and Platonic Idealism

[@ericdorland3707]

The Marxist KZbinr Hakim recently had an interview with Richard Wolff. I think a discussion between you and Hakim would be amazing!

[@Gaiafreak6969]

This would be sick

[@ericdorland3707]

@@Gaiafreak6969 Have seen Hakim in Paul's comment sections before so I'm hoping he sees this comment 👀

[@ericdorland3707]

@Shoshin Yeeeeessssss

[@cosmicwakes6443]

@@Gaiafreak6969 Hakim is an idealist.

[@Gaiafreak6969]

@@cosmicwakes6443 no the fuck he isnt wtf

[@hans4595]

I just want to tell you sir Paul Cockshott that I am a 2nd year Computer science student. Prior to discovering your channel and works and becoming a leftist, I was so close to shifting to getting a Bachelor of Arts in History degree. Thank you for serving as a guide and inspiration for me to continue my studies in Computer science in order to help build a rational and just society in the near future.

[@PsilentMusicUK]

@Grandoko Me too! Did you do a course-based MA or a research one? And if so, what did you research? Doing a research one gave me a lot more freedom to be original and not fall into repeating bourgeois rhetoric.

[@PsilentMusicUK]

@Grandoko Sounds good and good luck with it all. Will you publish it online when completed (academia.edu or whatever)? I was lucky enough to have a supervisor who let me take whatever approach I wished thankfully, other than guiding me on what I should use to get better marks. My study is about the portrayal of class, race and gender in British South Asian cinema, though I took a Marxist approach to it interspersed with Postcolonial theory and a little bit of postmodernism (by which I mean Derrida's theory of hospitality, and pretty much nothing else, only because it's pretty good at describing migrant relations between generations and could link it to my Marxist analysis of working class migrant-native conflict).

[@Taimur_Laal]

Thank you Paul.

[@paulcockshott8733]

I dont intend it to be critical of You Taimur

[@Taimur_Laal]

@@paulcockshott8733 you were not. There were no ad hominem attack. This debate is larger than us. And I do think that on some questions you are quite right. Hegelian thought did produce enormous amounts of mystical nonsense and rubbish. But I also feel that there are aspects of Hegel that have enriched the left. Sorting the wheat from the chaff is the main issue.

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@Taimur_Laal Indeed it is a very big issue having roots way back in the writing of the German Ideology. I think it significant that Lenin, Plekhanov etc did not have access to a published version of that text.

[@discogodfather22]

Lenin said in 1914: "It is impossible completely to understand Marx's Capital, and especially its first Chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel's Logic.". Dialectical Materialism seems to be the backbone of philosophical Marxism.

[@Alistairianism]

I'm going to say this is a rare Cockshott L. Hegel's Dialectical logic incorporates historical modes of consciousnesses, and then makes movements to new modes of consciousness. Einstein's relativity wasn't developed in a vacuum, but in response to the shortcomings of Newton's theories. Dialectical materialism has its roots in a previous mode of consciousness which is Hegelian thought. Even Hegel's phenomenology of spirit is understanding that each mode of consciousness has its root in a former mode of consciousness approaching absolute spirit/consciousness.

[@Ixam13]

This is a gross misrepresentation of Hegelian thought in general as well as the specific contents of Comrade Rahman's ecxellent lecture. As the term idealism might suggest, Hegel's conept of essence deals with essence as an idea and not as some kind of material substance that can be observed empircally. The lecture explicitly says that. Essence does in fact exist: as a concept with which to process the material world in our mind. For example, If you want to define or categorise something, you need to define what is essential to that defintion and what is contingent. Now, Hegel makes the point that this essence is not some metaphysical property of an object, but that the essence changes in regards to time as well as context. In different contextes or for different purposes other properties might be essential. Moreover, these properties themselves might chance over time or become unessential. The concept of essence therefore deals with the dialectical contradiction between necessity and contingency that drives on these movements. The Logic part is even worse. In Hegel's system logic refers to the abstract concepts of thought, i.e. the forms of thinking themselves, the most basic categories ( such as being, nothingness, essence etc.). It does not just mean and/or circuits. The logic of nature means nothing more than that nature is logical. It follows natural laws, causation etc. This does not mean it follows a preconceived plan. As such, this is a basic necessity for any natural sciences to be possible at all. Lastly, it is very undialectical to just dismiss past theories, concepts etc. People don't just think wrong for a long time and then suddenly (by divine intervention?) create correct theories. Theory develops and incorporates its preceding steps. It does not just discard all the "wrong 1820 modes of thinking". This does not even happen in natural sciences. Newtonian physics still apply, they are just cut down to the specific circumstances in which they apply. The conception of Marxism was heavily dependent on Hegelian idealism and has as such incorporated many of its parts without reformulating them. In order to fully undestand Marxism, we must not throw Hegel out of the window; we are advised, after all, to just turn him on his head. Maybe you'd like to digest a little bit more of a school of thought that has had such important impacts, before you try to take a dump on it.

[@paulcockshott8733]

What is the evidence to support the idea that you classify things by means of 'essences' in thought? We can immediately, without thinking, classify animals as felids or cannids. You can do it at a glance. Speculating that it is 'essences' in your thought process that enables you to do this classification gets you nowhere. Development of the theory of convolutional neural nets on the other hand not only gives and understanding of how it happens, but enables you to build automatic classifiers that work pretty reliably. When it comes to classifying extinct species into clades we do it by computing distances in abstract vector spaces of traits. The notion of essence is neither useful for determining how brains recognise things nor useful for understanding the forms of objects themselves. By modern standards Hegel's logic is absolutely dire. Axioms and rules of inference are not explicitly given so he is free to simply assert things. The stuff that is asserted does not come from logic, but is drawn from the then prevailing ideology, as chosen by the author. It is Boole's Laws of Thought, that you need to look at if you want the 19th century source of subsequent logical theory. You give Newton as supposed defence of taking Hegel seriously, but the contrast between Newtons Principles of Natural Philosophy and Hegel's Logic is huge. Newton starts out by defining terms, he then defines axioms - his laws, he then uses well established rules of inference drawn from Euclidean geometry to prove types of motion that would occur subject to different force laws. Having established all that, in Book III he looks at actual observations of the Jovian satellites and shows that these are only compatible with inverse square laws of gravitation. Newton stands up to the present day because he, unlike Hegel followed a non speculative approach, used rigorous and checkable proof procedures, and then verified his inferences by observations. That is why, as a Philosopher he stands head and shoulders above Hegel. You can base actual rocket science on Newton, you can land on the Moon, using Newton, you can base sweet Fanny Adams that actually works on Hegel.

[@paulcockshott8733]

'The conception of Marxism was heavily dependent on Hegelian idealism ', there is 'Marxism' and there is what Marx and Engels did. They explicitly rejected German Idealism root and branch in The German Ideology. They dont mention dialectics in that at all. Their standpoint was Historical Materialism. The 'Marxism' you are refering to is the tradition that descends from the SPD which, through the influence of Dietzgen adopted his invented philosophy of Dialectical Materialism.

[@paulcockshott8733]

You have to take into account that the German Ideology was not printed until 1932 , so Lenin did not know about Marx and Engels root and branch repudiation of the whole Hegelian and Hegelian derivative school. That is why the German Social Democrat theory of 'dialectical materialism' was accepted by Lenin as the valid philosophy of Marxism.

[@Ixam13]

@@paulcockshott8733 Essence is not about any physical properties of our brain and does not try to explain how our brain is wired materially. Determining what is essential to something and what is not, is such a basic operation of thought that I cannot really understand where you are coming from. That essence does not "exist" as some metaphysical entity billowing about or as a material characteristic of things is precisely what Hegel tries to show. Essence is not a thing, but a relation between subject and object. You for one seem to regard the German Ideology as essential to understanding Marxism, specifically in its regard to Hegel. This is questionable but does show that you do like to wallow in essence, if you think no one is looking. As for that particular matter, the German Ideology has a nice first chapter, which gives a good overview of historical materialism, but the remaining 80% of the book consist of beatings for philosophical scoundrels, who have fortunately failed to make any lasting impact on history. It is entertaining, but hardly one of the most essential texts in Marxism. Most importantly, it is not a refutation of Hegels philosophy. It does seem to claim that in certain parts, but Hegel is mentioned mostly in passing, with the main body of text dealing with philosophies that might have called themselves successors to Hegelianism, but in reality bear very little resemblance to it. Marx and Engels sure attack Hegel several times, and not just in the German Ideology, but the only more or less thorough critique of any of his works, remains the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Instead, Engels considers Hegel's Logic to be the true core of Hegelianism and asserts that Hegelian dialectics are basically correct if you discard their mystical framework. Again, turn Hegel on his head, not slit his throat and cast him in a ditch. They both use Hegels dialectics all throughout their works. As such, I would hardly believe, that Lenin would have cast away his entire philosophy because of the publication of one obscure (and very contemporary) text, which does not even say anything new about Hegel. Lenin endorsed dialectics, not because some social democrat told him to, but because he found it to be correct and useful in his political practice. Even if this would be a purely scholastic question of exigesis, a quick search of my MEW, finds 815 results for the word Dialektik alone. Hegelian thought may not get a rocket into pace. But it does seem to help to create a state that can.

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@Ixam13 You completely misunderstand what I am saying about the German Ideology. Marxism was founded in the repudiation of the German Ideology, that is to say the entire tradition of German idealist speculative philosophy. The German Ideology is both the title of a book and the thing that Marxism repudiates. You continue to use the mystical categories of German Ideology when you write 'Essence is not a thing, but a relation between subject and object. ' The very terms 'subject and object', are internal to German bourgeois philosophy. They are introduced as 'subject of right' in Fichte and then abreviated to simply 'subject' by later philosophers. But the subject and object are just the German Idealist philosophers abstractions of the bourgeois property owner and his property. The subject is an explicit borrowing of a legal category. Insofar as you still think in terms of 'subject and object' you are still operating within the mystified forms of the German ideology. There are no subjects outside of legal relations. Apple Inc is a subject, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG is a subject, ie, an owner of property able to enter into trading contracts. You are stuck within this mode of thought that is nothing but the mystification of bourgeois property relations. It was not Hegelian thought that put Gagarin in orbit, it was the superiority of socialist planned economy and the massive education in mathmatics and physical sciences carried out by the USSR from the 1930s. "Where speculation ends - in real life - there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. "

[@thall77795]

Hi everyone, I'm an example of a person in my twenties who was educated with concepts from the 1820s. The stuff on Hegel here is really bad and misinformed. So-called "materialists" think that because Hegel's an idealist, they have to be against him. But this leaves a lot of leftists to then post-rationalize being against Hegel which leads to a lot of terrible interpretations and arguments. For instance, Hegel is not being "mystical" with concepts like being and nothing. Not only are these abstract concepts necessary for the functioning of the natural sciences, but we see them everywhere else as well. If something is something but not something else, then there you go, being and nothing are integral to what makes "something" intelligible. Bam. The abstractness of such concepts and thus the humility with which we must use them is actually part of Hegels point. We tend to wrongly fetisize abstractions (analogous to this is so called commodity fetishism). And yes, there is a logic to nature. "Logic can only occur when you have patterns of matter that are so configured that they perform logical operations." This shows a huge misunderstanding of what logic means for Hegel. You say matter performs logic, but you don't recognize that matter as such already contains a logic by virtue of which it can be configured into such operations at all. You work on a limited, Aristotelian understanding of logic as a set of empty formal operations. But Hegel is getting at something much broader. He cares about the base structural intelligibility of things which allow you to at all understand what you mean when you say "matter." At 10:20 you ask for a useful understanding of a real process that Hegelian thought can help with. Two examples of Hegelian method at work are Marx's Capital and perhaps even Sartre's Being and Nothingness--both of which begin with abstractions which immanently push toward the more concrete. But at the end of the day, what Hegelian logic is trying to do is perform a metacognition, a thinking about thinking. It gets at the bare intelligibility of things. This is why people can't seem to "escape" Hegel as they say. As long as what you're saying is intelligible at all, you're in Hegel's territory. It doesn't matter if he's from the 1820s.

[@happychey13]

This ^

[@thall77795]

@Eleanor Jones It's not twisting the definition really. Hegel needed a term for a science of pure thought, a thinking of thinking where the subject and object of the science are the same. The best term to use at that time in 19th century Germany really seemed to be "logic." The term then was already quite malleable since it was being used to refer to both Aristotelian and transcendental logics. In fact, Hegel's application of the term is arguably better since the principles upon which formal and transcendental logics operate are not themselves derived from pure thought but rather presupposed from the beginning, i.e. lacking immanent necessity and universality. This forces those sciences to lack a rightful claim to being pure sciences of thinking as such. This does not make Paul's use of the term "logic" invalid--it has its uses and scope--but it simply leads him to speak past Hegel rather than meaningfully deal with him. If you're going to critique a philosopher, you first need to know what they mean. Further, you're welcome to disagree with individual claims Hegel makes concerning nature. (If it helps, my understanding is that many of Hegel's uglier claims come before his mature system as that earlier phase of his career is what usually comes under most criticism.) I do not treat philosophers as religious doctrine, so I feel no need to defend any particular odd claim Hegel makes in the abstract, especially because my knowledge of his philosophy of nature is limited (although certainly better than what others can make of it). What a lot of people don't understand is that it's not enough to point to individual claims which are wrong. What someone like Paul is trying to show is that there is no logic to nature such that, *in principle*, Hegel is misguided from the very beginning with regard to his project as such and as a whole. Although, I'm fairly certain that Paul had no clue what Hegel's project concerning nature even was when he made this presentation. You mention Hegel not leading to new discoveries. This is a strange worry. The idea that philosophy needs to be useful is a misconception. Philosophy exists for its own sake, comprehension for the sake of comprehension. Although, I would certainly say that a huge problem with today's empirical science is a lack of comprehending the actual implications of concepts and how they immanently operate. If you are looking for certain things Hegel discerned early, I might point to his disregard of Euclidean geometry as a necessary and universal science. After showing that one can derive the determinations of point, line, and plane from the mere concept of self-externality as such, he mentioned that the definitions given by geometricians were quite arbitrarily posited. Today, we know that other geometries using different arbitrary principles are possible and employable. But they all abstractly incorporate the necessary determinations Hegel found in the concept of space as moments of their intelligibility. That is, by revealing what the necessary minimal determinations of these categories in fact were, he saw the futility in claiming any absoluteness to the specific geometry of his day, which from my understanding was quite controversial back then. I think that deserves some praise. The things you want people to study that would take years of hard work are fine so long as the claims made are conceptually viable, i.e. cognizable. Hegelian thinking seems to me to work best in intelligibility-checking concepts. Insofar as this conceptual viability is achieved, I don't see any reason why we need to be locked into the opposition of learning Hegelian thought *or* mathematical physics. In fact, both seem pretty important to me. The thing about Marx is arbitrary to me. Discovering something and comprehending it are two different things. Hegel himself constantly credits historical figures for being the first to employ this truth or that. But the point of dialectical analysis is to systematize knowledge such that what may seem a matter of opinion, intution, or finite deduction is in fact necessary to the whole as an incorporated moment. It's not a mere mode of exposition. It's a way to show, given some immediate abstraction (being, space, the commodity-form, etc.), a wealth of concretizing content must follow to render that abstraction intelligible. This way, the supposed immediacy of that abstraction is shown, *immanently*, to be the fetishization that it is. Being does not sit on its side in absolute opposition to nothing or determinateness, space does not sit on its side in absolute opposition matter which "fills" it, and the commodity does not exist in abstraction from labor. But only through the Hegelian analysis you deem arbitrary can this be shown *by virtue of the abstractions themselves.*

[@niart4600]

@@thall77795 Interesting that you say "understand philosophers before you critique them", then go on to criticize Marx without an understanding of his argument. Marx is only saying that commodities mediate, and therefore obscure, social relations. That people mistake social relations for relations of things. For example, it was very clear to a serf that his lord exploited him. The serf would be forced by contract to give either some of his labour or produce to his lord and therefore it was very clear what the social relationship was, one of exploitation. A worker, however, agrees to do a specified amount of labour in exchange for a wage. It appears to the worker, then, that his labour is worth, on the market, this amount of money. If he wants more, he should make his labour more meaningful to the market. He needs to make his commodity more valuable in relationship to other commodities. You can see now that social relationships in society are obscured by commodities, that the worker cannot see past the commodity veil and realize he is being exploited. Commodities are a fetish, religious items that we believe are imbued with magical power because we forget what they actually are, they obscure their basis in social relations.

[@thall77795]

@@niart4600 Okay, what did I say above that you are disagreeing with?

[@niart4600]

@@thall77795 You implied that Marx's commodity fetishism is untrue

[@lrgroene]

It is very common to see leftist videos explaining and promoting dialectics, but it seems much rarer to see similar attention paid to the materialism. Sadly, there's a latent skepticism of materialism and atheism on the contemporary left because such ideas have-at least in popular culture-come to be associated with a kind of neo social darwinism around the "New Atheists." Many leftists have instead decided to openly embrace spiritualism and mysticism. This video is a good antidote to this sad trend. Off topic, but I wonder if you might be able to do a video critiquing MMT. I know very little about it, but it seems like the theory must be rooted in some sort of subjectivism, since like the neoclassicals they seem to think that value doesn't exist and that money is wholly created and dictated by political subjects, abstracted from the division of labor and the distribution of socially necessary labor time.

[@Ajente02]

Greetings, mr. Cockshott. How about Engels' _"Dialectics of Nature"_ and _"Anti-Dühring"_ chapter on Logic? Engels (like Marx) based his materialist viewpoints on a criticism of Hegelian dialectics (turned "upside down"); without Hegel it's impossible to understand basic Marxist conceptualization of nature and society. There is also the argument of Engels that formal logic is a reflection of real material phenomena on even the most basic levels of matter (he uses as example derivative and integral functions, as a reflection of matter aggregation from molecules to atoms to subatomic particles... using this process Engels even hypothesized about quarks, decades before quantum mechanics were even a thing!), which contradict the assertion on the video that certain level of developed organization of matter is needed for logic to occur. Anyway, great topic. Thanks for the effort! PS: I started to follow you pretty recently (3-4 weeks ago) and I'm fascinated by your works on AI planning, "really existing socialism" critique, and econophysics. I'm currently drafting an introductory book (on Spanish, my native tongue) to leftism/socialism and its traditions (scientific, utopian, libertarian and reformist) intended to educate non-leftists. I'd love to cite your _"Toward a New Socialism"_ for some precisions, but current Spanish translation is awful. EDIT: I also forgot to mention... On both books Engels heavily criticized these 'scientificist' (or, as he called back then, "naturalist") views that only scientific materialist knowledge is needed today, and that learning philosophy is useless. He asserted that theoretical frameworks and philosophical paradigms (like the one Hegelian dialectics proposes) are a fundamental requirement to approach nature, and without them it's impossible to conceptualize about anything (much less to differentiate between correct and incorrect interpretations of reality). In this sense, as far as I understand, Engels makes a pretty strong defense of Hegelianism (in its corrected inversion proposed by Marx) as an opposition both of metaphysics and mechanical materialism, of subjective idealism and (logic) positivism.

[@paulcockshott8733]

We will deal with that in due course

[@stalinbirbal3788]

@@paulcockshott8733 Comrade when will you be making a video on this topic

[@bruhmoment5034]

"Logic is reducible to interactions between matter". Woah that is incredible, so the logic is contingent on material arrangements, and since no two material arragnments are the same, then that would imply that no two logics are the same? How would you bridge that gap? you can't. Logic itself would be in question, and if logic itself is in question then the very means by which youre making an argument would be in question.

[@JS-dt1tn]

that is a nice critique. This video, though I am only 12 minutes in, seems to ignore the things that German Idealists concerned themselves with apropos dogmatism (materialism). Mainly, with the questions you raised, how can materialism of this type explain synthetic a priori truths? Or even consciousness for that matter as a non-object? Or freedom of the conscious mind as conscious (f)act-ivity ala Fitche? Paul's lack of knowledge about idealism is showing here.

[@bruhmoment5034]

@@JS-dt1tn And there is such richness in that study. To write all of it off because it doesn't conform to "modern science" is just total liberal dogma. That I think, rests on more presuppositions than even some religious dogmas.

[@JS-dt1tn]

@@bruhmoment5034 I'm glad you realize the dogma as such. This was the type of stuff Foucualt made crystal clear nearly 50 years ago now! Enlightenment dogma is a nasty thing and hard to see through. I usually find Paul's materialist commentaries of socialism (and the limits thereof) fantastic. This video howsoever really misses the mark, and essentially proves Foucualt's argument in lockstep.

[@paulcockshott8733]

Two logical machines compute the same function provided that there is (1) a way of identifying the encoding of the inputs and outputs of the machines and (2) a finite procedure to run through the possible inputs and outputs and show them identical. If by two logics you mean two axiomatic systems, then no, there is no general way of proving the equivalence of axiomatic systems, this is a consequence of the halting problem.

[@johnlowrie6456]

However profound the influence of Hegel's philosophy on Marx's thinking Marx himself came to abandon Hegelian categories: ''In the version of Capital Volume I which Marx published in 1867 almost every reference to Subsumtion and Potenzen was removed...this process of revision was continued in the second edition of Capital published in 1872, and in the French translation completed in 1875''(J.D. White , ''Karl Marx and the Intellectual Origins of Dialectical Materialism'' P362 1996). According to White, ''Ostensibly going back to the Hegelian roots of Marx's ideas for inspiration, Plekhanov elaborated a theory which he termed 'dialectical materialism.' This was not so much a variant of Marx's original ideas as their antithesis'' (Ibid. p365).

[@paulcockshott8733]

Can you get me that text by White?

[@dionysianapollomarx]

Thanks for this. Been looking for good reasons and ways to criticize Kastrup's Platonism. This may be of some use. Unfortunately, not sure if it gets around certain readings of Hegel as espousing some kind of dialetheic logic. Unless, of course, there's good reasons to say dialetheism should be refuted.

[@hansfrankfurter2903]

Hegel was not an idealist , he was a dual aspect monist. Basically believing the world to be one massive self resolving contradiction. There is an element of dialethiesm to it I’d say.

[@kosherwhitewine5879]

interested to hear your perspective

[@eddypitono4995]

It will be interesting if you talk about philosophy more often.

[@aurochs2449]

The birds singing is a great touch.

[@zacoolm]

Dr. Paul, if you are not totally dismissive of Hegel’s work, what aspect(s) of his philosophy you agree with?

[@kazisiddiqui6435]

Being and nothing had specific connotations in Hegel's philosophical milieu. If you read empiricists like Hume, a question emerges: If you take a physical object like a red ball and abstract away all its qualities one by one: its color, shape, weight, etc, then what is the pure existence AKA "being" that you are left with at the end? Hegel simply substitutes the common answer at the time: pure being with no qualities is nothing. After all, it is defined as having no qualities! Where Hegel tries to be different is that he tries to use this abstract observation to bootstrap an entire metaphysical system: nothing to being is becoming, becoming is coming to be and ceasing to be, all the way down to notions, essences, and most controversially, absolute knowing, which ironically coincides with Socrates' claim that the only thing he knows is that he knows nothing. It's kind of like when today's mathematicians use the empty set and the set notation braces {} to define all natural numbers. Also, I don't think Plato and Hegel are worthless. Beautiful writing often involves the practical application of idealistic philosophy and at times, even theology. What these disciplines are not good for is doing science. Contra Plato, beauty is not truth, but it can be useful for invoking invisible agents. See, eg, How God Becomes Real by Tanya Luhrmann. Since a large part of our brain is dedicated to the task of tracking invisible agents, I sometimes wonder if we could have a materialist reversal of Proclus to create a theurgy that teaches the geometric anatomy of theoretical physics like in the lectures by Schuller on KZbin. Would physics education be more exciting if we claimed that every logical distinction in physical geometry is a transcendent divinity of some kind? Of course, in this theurgy, the One would be the lowest concept, not the highest like in Neoplatonic theology.

[@paulcockshott8733]

Peano is operationalisable. You can build, and admittedly inefficient, computer arithmetic system on it. The most that you can build with Hegel's logic is a ring oscillator.

[@kazisiddiqui6435]

@@paulcockshott8733 Idealist philosophy is bad for doing science like I said in the third paragraph, but it can be suggestive when you are trying to invent fictional personalities. For example, see the book Hegel's Interpretation of the Religions of the World. I believe it's by Jon Stewart and available for free from pdfdrive. From this book, it's clear to me that not only did Hegel misunderstand science, but his grasp of humanistic disciplines was also spotty and impressionistic at best. What he was good at is inventing arguments that form the basis for verisimilar subjective motivations. His discussions could be useful if you're trying to invent fictional personality traits that feel real. The closest that idealist philosophy can come to serve as the basis for science is if natural laws can somehow be characterized as "real ideas" in the Platonic tradition. The obvious problem is that I don't think most people need to believe in "real ideas" to believe in mechanical laws underlying natural phenomena. Furthermore, the doctrine of "real ideas" comes with a lot of radical consequences that cannot be justified simply on the observation that mechanical laws exist in nature. I think you have done a good job distinguishing idealist conflations in your videos. Eg. Lamba calculus is a programming language, but not a computer in the sense that Turing machines are blueprints for actual computing devices. I don't know if anyone actually claimed to use lambda calculus as an argument against mechanical naturalism. However, IIRC Kurt Godel actually intended his general recursive functions to prove that thought is non-mechanical in nature. That is, before his system was proved to be equivalent to Turing machines. Maybe making the same argument with general recursive functions instead of lambda calculus would be more to the point. Then again, lambda calculus is still popular these days, and I've never heard an idealist recently invoking general recursive functions to prove anything. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem has caught on much more among pseudointellectuals.

[@bradmodd7856]

What use would physical sciences have for metaphysical concepts like essence? You can't navigate the metaphysical without tools and devices like those constructed by philosophers. Concepts like atoms, molecules and subatomic particles are are only a way to describe underlying processes we are yet to understand, these are only temporary markers used in the meantime. Essence is a similar marker, there is no arguing it is not correct, IT ISN'T, the argument is for whether it is useful and that depends on the user.

[@ggh8384]

Can you explain fascism? When you compare Fascist italy to say the US or UK at the same time, how was it really different beyond the surface level?

[@KommentarSpaltenKrieger]

Should materialism be understood as the primacy of matter or as the proposition that matter is the only thing that is ?

[@paulcockshott8733]

There are no spirits, though the idea of spirits pneumena, was just an early materialistic theory of how the brain worked by pneumatic pressure. Idealists detached it from its original materialist framework in Galen and made it mystical, except for aqua-vita or Uisce beatha ;)

[@Ajente02]

@@paulcockshott8733 How about the modern understanding on theory of mind of the "spiritual" (aka. the consciousness) as an epiphenomenon which emerges from the material processes, but which are not an identity with these processes?

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@Ajente02 Is what is appears on your screen now an epiphenomenon of your graphics card?

[@BlingSco]

@@Ajente02 how could you have something that wasn't identical with the material thing, even if the material thing creates a qualitative process (which would be a material thing). That is hard to trace out from the sum of its parts (epistemologically). It still can be traced out from the sums of its parts (epistemological and ontologically), because that's all there is there is no duality of reality involved. It is a materialist monoism.

[@Ajente02]

@@paulcockshott8733 In the broad definition of epiphenomenon, yeah it could be said so. I must clarify I'm still confused between all the different materialist approaches to the mind-body problem (like emergent materialism, eliminative materialism, non-reductive materialism, functionalism, or even process dualism), all of them with equally convincing arguments for and against their positions, and some of them mutually compatible up to use a certain degree. That's why I wanted to know your opinion about the subject.

[@rsavage-r2v]

I was expecting a critique of platonism in software architecture, but I see the problem goes even deeper. Are there modern materials on programming as rational engineering, or do I just have to go back to Dijkstra & co.?

[@paulcockshott8733]

We have critiques of platonism in CS in 'Computation and its Limits' and in our papers referenced there

[@bruhmoment5034]

historical materialism does not neccesitate metaphysical idealism. And Metaphysical, Naturalistic materialism is totally bankrupt.

[@dempa3]

Thanks for another interesting video. I think it is good to discuss what is an important read, what less important, and why. The reality is that our time is limited. Also interesting to find out about Taimur Rahman, it will be interesting to learn more about Pakistan through his lectures. On a different topic. Do you think agent based simulations are of any significant value to the study of economics? If one would be able to model different material conditions and agents to represent, which would form different economic systems (pre historic communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism), given certain material conditions, could that be used to get a better understanding of capitalism, and what is needed to transition to communism? To me it sounds like it would be a good idea, but I have a suspicion in reality maybe it is far to difficult to model material conditions and to model us as these agents, which would lead to far to simplistic models, and therefore not really useful in practice. Any thoughts on this approach?

[@magikarpmagikarp9497]

I just wanna thank you for making your videos. They're so good at explaining stuff and so important.

[@alexandershendi7428]

Hi! Is the video truncated at the end or is it just me having problems with KZbin?

[@BlingSco]

I think the logic of nature can be easily said to be interpreted as the necessity of nature of you want to use more accurate terminology. Dialectical materialism comes from or closely related to a school called romanticism, and romanticism states that every philosophical school has some sort of "internal kernel of truth or genius". This is why diamat doesn't disregard any school, it instead makes the correct materialist interpretation of them takes the good and correct and disregards the bad.

[@ottowillekuusinen216]

Do you think modern Cuba is more democratic than the USSR was?

[@sinekonata]

Essence is a thing in linguistics though. And therefore in all of the sciences since they are built on those languages.

[@paulcockshott8733]

I am not convinced by this. Recent work on meaning that can be put to practical use relies on geometric ideas not the notion of essences, Dominic Widdows and Peter Gardenfors have books on how this works.

[@hansfrankfurter2903]

@@paulcockshott8733 I think this is a semantic argument. All of mathematics is abstraction of “essences” , that are supposed to work in certain conditions in the real world. So any time you engage in describing the world , you will do “essentializing” of some sort because its always going to be a simplification. Basically alot of what you say sounds like nominalism, I.e there are no categories just instantiations. There is also similarities with logical positivism, I.e any statement that can’t be verified perceptually is meaningless. I am also bothered by some of the pretentious obscurantism in Hegel but I think he is a giant thinker that still should be studied.

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@hansfrankfurter2903 Maths is collections of rules for manipulating signs, tokens, memory elements or pictures. In some cases there are operational procedures by which empirical measurements can be transformed into these signs or states of memory elements, symbolic or graphical operations are then performed, and the resulting symbols or pictures tell us what to expect about the world. There is no need to invoke essences anywhere. If I and my students write software that takes time traces from a ground penetrating radar set, and the software performs various correlation operations on them, we end up with a recognisable picture of a burried landmine. ( I have a video on how to do this ) At no point do we have recourse to 'essences' in doing this. We use various machines, skills in the use of these machines, but no essences.

[@sinekonata]

@@paulcockshott8733 > At no point do we have recourse to 'essences' in doing this I haven't found time to look up the linguistic works you referenced but seeing this answer maybe it's not necessary. By essence I'm not speaking of a spiritual concept, but a linguistic one. In the case of your software, somewhere in the code there must be a point where the landmine is defined as a non arbitrary collection of fundamental data points so that the software can determine "this is a landmine, but these are just random data points". And without this definition of landmine, there is no science/knowledge that is useful to humans. My point is that without an observer (human, software, ...) to emerge "essences" from a picture, the picture is equivalent to random noise, meaningless. Until someone/something has defined "this is what a landmine ideally looks like", ideal form which you called a kernel in that experiment, there is no way for processing anything. Without words (essence), there is no language (science). The software then compares the "ideal" kernel with observation. Well this kernel is what idealists/linguists, I wager (if they don't then I do), would call the essence of the object to the radar program you designed. The same way that in our brains, there is a formed ideal construction (like a programming class perhaps) of what a landmine is, and our brain matches that kernel/essence of a landmine to the sensory data we acquire through the object, a photo, the word "landmine" etc (which would be the programming instance?) ... I hope that with this much more general definition of essence, we agree at least more on the subject.

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@sinekonata I am refering to the ground penetrating radar landmine visualiser described in a previous video. It presents as output a 3d surface model that a person can recognise as a mine, a buried pistol etc. It does not do mine recognition itself. I was using the example to respond to the previous posters claim that maths is the abstraction of essences. I would say no, maths is a technology. On your point about recognising things. I dont see how talk of essences adds anything to just talking about classification or grouping. There are various statistical techniques for grouping points in high dimensional feature spaces. To describe these in terms of 2500 year old philosophical terms like 'essences' is a simplification and not a particularly helpful one. Some simplifications are justifiable as a means of popularising complex ideas, but talk of essences is not even a popularisation any more, since you can not popularise things using such outdated and archaic language.

[@ReubenIB]

Wonderful as always!

[@lwawfafafafaa8957]

BIG SHOUTOUT TO TAIMUR

[@huntsman8787]

I don't get the "no essences" part. If the thing the makes cats cats is their genetic code, then why isn't their "essence" their genetic code?

[@Ajente02]

Cats vary between themselves in their genetic code a lot (though not as much as between cats and wildcats, for example -and even then there are lot of nuances on the edges of both species' genomes); there is not single "cat genetic code".

[@huntsman8787]

@@Ajente02 I agree, but then as Cockshott says, "What makes us call them cats?"

[@Ajente02]

@@huntsman8787 When we deal with common day-to-day basic physics problems, we tend to use classical physics instead of the more precise modern physics (which takes account for general relativity, special relativity, and quantum mechanics); it's more practical and convenient to oversimplify and treat mundane issues as apparently metaphysical and static (even when we know it's not). In a similar manner, when we deal with common day-to-day basic biology, we tend to use oversimplified concepts (like "binary sex", "Darwinian evolution", or, in this case, "cat species") because the more nuanced reality is not useful for practical everyday purposes besides of their specialised scientific studies. We call them "cats" for the same reason we call "north" to the Arctic: practical and historical language conventions.

[@jakesecondname2462]

Functional programming can make parallel programmes much easier to write, though.

[@paulcockshott8733]

I dont dispute that for some things it is easier to express algorithms functionally. But the parallel aspect can be handled well by imperative array languages like F90 as well.

[@bruhmoment5034]

In order to predicate of anything or make normative claims of anything, you must presuppose that there is something shared among all individuals being predicated that is itself not any instance of each one of them. And that thing which is shared about any of them cannot be material or physical or spatio-temporally related because it would violate the fact that the thing shared cannot be reducible to any member in the group. And further, this thing must not be nominal, but actually real. That thing is immaterial, non-spatial, and a real essence shared among all members.

[@Ajente02]

Using formal logic to defend idealism... cringe.

[@bruhmoment5034]

@@Ajente02 propositional language is supposed to be an approximation of formal logic.

[@Ajente02]

@@bruhmoment5034 The issue is formal logic can't grasp at the inherent contradictions in objects on practical reality. Analytical thinking is pretty much useless and lame, as the conclusions they draw from their thought process (much like your OP) are fundamentally wrong when applied to the practical, real, concrete, material world.

[@bruhmoment5034]

@@Ajente02 there are no inherent contradictions in object in practical reality because if there were then the fact of you communicating them would negate the process by which you even understood it and communicated it.

[@bruhmoment5034]

@@Ajente02 And further, if there were apparent contradictions in the material relations of objects, then I would assume idealism which were assert that immaterial properties can have indeterminate spontaneity would have more explanatory power than object determinant materialism.

[@doin_fine]

Reminds me of an old Buddhist adage: with our thoughts we make the world. It is true in a way but radical subjectivism is out of control nowadays. I don't like saying "identity politics" but whatever you call it, I dislike it.

[@marcosparajua2963]

Thanks for your video, it's very interesting as always, even the sort of disastrous interview by the economics student recently uploaded. Would you say, for instance, that it is helpful to look at how ideas of democracy work, seen as it is understood generally in an instrumental and technical way that opposes it's "real meaning"? In regards to being, biographical experience isn't reducible to physiology, it's correlative, wouldn't you agree?

[@BlingSco]

I think most materialist would think that essences would be common patterns of matter configuration that occur in many sets of objects. I think throwing out the idea of essences is very dangerous indeed, some things like post-modernism do exactly that and look where it leads to.

[@paulcockshott8733]

Genomes are common patterns of matter that occur in many objects, cells. But these common patterns only have causal effectivity if they are made of the right substances. A common pattern of nucleic acid bases has an enduring and replicating effect that, a common pattern of amino acids in a protein does not. Talking about essences is just what Althusser called an 'ideological closure', it pretends to be an answer but prevents you discovering real material causes.

[@JS-dt1tn]

@@paulcockshott8733 Paul, essences are certainly a strawman. Let's talk about the true difficulties of classic materialism that Fitche and Hegel among others raised. If materialism tells us that material stuff is behind all activity, how can it explain representation? A materialist can tell us how nerve endings transmit signals to our brain, which is to say that the materialist can tell us of electrochemical processes in the body, but then how do we get to the activity of observing? Materialists simply cannot speak of it. Consciousness itself is not a thing, and it is not an experience, it is the activity that makes all experience possible. The knowing subject in materialism can only be understood as a thing in the world and there is no way to explain this activity of knowing as not just another thing. Consciousness is not another representation of matter at work, it is the activity that makes all representation possible. Materialism can explain being excellently, but cannot explain the seeing or the observing, the activity of consciousness, that makes the given representation of what we experience possible. In short, materialism cannot explain the transition from being to representation. I would love to read your reply to this Fitchean critique of classic materialism. This is but one possible argument to raise against materialism.

[@paulcockshott8733]

@@JS-dt1tn I think you should say 'the knowing subject in idealism'. The philosophical subject is just the reification of bourgeois legal categories by the early philosophers of the German bourgeoisie. It is not a theory of how the brain works. There is no grounds to suppose that bourgeois legal categories exist in brains. The German Ideology reifies the legal categories of early bourgeois society into the imagined foundations of reality.

[@BlingSco]

@@JS-dt1tn When you take an agnostic approach to these matters. No matter what anyone says you won't be satisfied.

[@JS-dt1tn]

@@paulcockshott8733 You're really close to getting at what I'm getting at! I hear you, and have spent plenty of time with the German Ideology. Again, what you just described, and what Marx and Engels describe is being, or many different types of being (as many as your class will allow). But im not taking about being, or what types of ideas you possess and how you relate to the world through your social relation to the material relations, im talking about the activity of your brain representing the world to you. The activity of consciousness in not a bourgeois ideal. And no matter what we positively define any such consciousness to possess, we have ignored discussing how the brain represents the world to itself via the activity of consciousness. Again, the activity of consciousness is not an object, and so therefore not an ideal, but the activity that makes all experience possible.

[@VVeltanschauung187]

More explanations on how things work but not what they are. We're not getting anywhere, and the fact of the matter is that you not making any distinction between Hegel and Plato proves you've read neither

[@Booer]

Letsgoooo

[@ggh8384]

Rename this video "Debunking Hegel in 10 minutes or less" 😂

[@ultra7021]

ok fine u won I'll talke the free introductory course to computing science at harvard 👆

[@parkertrager4849]

YESSS

[@slightlygruff]

Russian programmers oppose Hegel vehemently

[@lucasbuvinic240]

"Just a short video* *25 mins long*

[@uiodxt5772]

Stay in your lane old man.

[@kazohinia5751]

I hope you're no longer on Discord, get off that hellsite.

[@bjk7300]

"Lane" is idealist.

[@ggh8384]

@L Did you watch the video? It's explicitly anti dialectics and if that's not convincing enough go read his blog about Hegel.

[@ggh8384]

@Shoshin nope.

[@ggh8384]

@L All of Marx's main theories work just fine without dialectics. Is there actually anything from marx that doesn't work without dialectics?