This thread is for the discussion of cybercommunism, the planning of the socialist economy by computerized means, including discussions of related topics and creators. Drama belongs in /isg/
ReadingTowards a New Socialism by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell:
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/Brain of the Firm by Stafford Beer
Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina
Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings (1st edition) by Norbert Wiener
Economic cybernetics by Nikolay Veduta
People's Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
Economics in kind, Total socialisation and A system of socialisation by Otto Neurath (Incommensurability, Ecology, and Planning: Neurath in the Socialist Calculation Debate by Thomas Uebel provides a summary)
Active writers/creatorsSorted by last name
>Paul Cockshotthttps://www.patreon.com/williamCockshott/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UCVBfIU1_zO-P_R9keEGdDHQ)
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/http://paulcockshott.co.uk/https://twitter.com/PaulCockshott (
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/PaulCockshott)
>Cibcom (Spanish)https://cibcom.org/https://twitter.com/cibcomorg (
https://nitter.pussthecat.org/cibcomorg)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCav9ad3TMuhiWV6yP5t2IpA (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UCav9ad3TMuhiWV6yP5t2IpA)
>Tomas Härdinhttps://www.haerdin.se/tag/cybernetics.htmlhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5fDgA_eHleDiTLC5qb5g8w (
https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UC5fDgA_eHleDiTLC5qb5g8w)
>Elena Vedutahttp://www.strategplan.com/en/about/veduta.phpVarious videos on YouTube but no channel of her own
>Dave Zachariahhttps://www.it.uu.se/katalog/davza513One video on Paul Cockshott's channel
Podcasts>General Intellect UnitPodcast of the Cybernetic Marxists
http://generalintellectunit.net/Previous threads in chronological orderhttps://archive.is/uNCEYhttps://web.archive.org/web/20201218152831/https://bunkerchan.xyz/leftypol/res/997358.htmlhttps://archive.ph/uyggphttps://archive.is/xBFYYhttps://archive.ph/Afx5ahttps://archive.is/kAPvRhttps://archive.is/0sAS2 144 posts and 30 image replies omitted.>>2002188the point is that humans are subjects of human society. a dog doesn't participate in our society the same way people do. perhaps a better word is
agencybeing a materialist also doesn't mean subjective experiences don't matter. such thinking is physicalist
>>1993871>>1993090In which Cockshott projects philosophical dualism onto Althusser, who, was the prime example of an anti-dualist materialist.
Mind you, I love Cockshott's economic works (of which I'm a main translator) and I also adore Althusser's "aleatory materialism," but the two together produces a mishmash of nonsense.
Yes, I'm familiar with Ck's "How the World Works" and how in it he "utilizes" Althusser to "correct" Marx's supposed teleological view of the development of the modes of production.
That's all fair, but that doesn't negate the fact that Cockshott is a DUALIST (ideology/idealism vs. physicism/materiality) and tries to abolish said dualism by asserting that QUALIA doesn't exist, lol.
That's the biggest cope-out that can be, mind you.
>>2002225>>2002321>>2002436"denying qualia" isn't the own you think it is.
If i had to guess Cockshott subscribes to Daniel Dennett's views. Dennett is after all on his official 'materialist philosophy' reading list.
Dennett started as a compatibilist but eventually moved to denying qualia outright. For Dennett, mental states, including consciousness, are entirely the result of physical processes in the brain and the concept of qualia is so confused that it cannot be put to any use or understood in any non-contradictory way, and therefore does not constitute a valid refutation of physicalism.
Dennett suggests that our experiences aren’t as private and undeniably accurate as the concept of qualia assumes. He uses examples like color perception, where different people may experience colors differently, to argue that our perception can change over time or due to context. Thus, there's no perfectly private "redness" of red because experiences vary between individuals and situations. Qualia can't be defined in any objective or testable way. He proposes thought experiments, such as the famous "inverted spectrum" scenario, to show that it’s impossible to verify if two people experience the same “redness” when looking at a red object. If qualia can’t be communicated or verified, he argues, then they aren’t useful for understanding consciousness scientifically or philosophically.
Phenomenology, in the philosophy of mind, is therefore superseded by "heterophenomenology" i.e. phenomenology of another, not oneself. It is an explicitly third-person, anthropological/scientific approach to the study of consciousness and other mental phenomena. This method involves analyzing people's descriptions and behaviors regarding their conscious experiences rather than attempting to access private, untestable experiences. This approach treats subjective reports as data to be analyzed rather than as direct access to a unique, subjective reality.
Dennett ultimately suggests that the feeling of “qualia” is an illusion created by the brain. He proposes that consciousness can be explained entirely through physical processes and functional states without invoking mysterious, non-physical qualities. In this view, consciousness is a complex, physical process, and the subjective qualities we think we “feel” are simply an illusion or a trick of our introspection. Understanding is merely a property that emerges from lots of distributed quasi-understanding in a large system, ex: the human brain.
This is indeed, a philosophical stance deeply grounded in anglo-analytic philosophy and logical/analytical behaviorism, itself derived from the thought of Vienna circle positivists and Dennett's own doctoral advisor, the
British philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who argued that:
>"mind" is "a philosophical illusion hailing chiefly from René Descartes and sustained by logical errors and 'category mistakes' which have become habitual.Again, you can disagree with these views but to call them dualist or philosophically illiterate is just misinformed. >>2002455yes and thats the issue
the invisible hand must be made visible
this to me is the symbol of post-capiitalism; a true look at the mechanics of power rather than their ideological obscuration
>>2002462>market is visibleit isnt though. it is hidden behind uncritical institutions that never give a total account of the world system
>we need a better regulatoryes, but more intrinsically - we must feel ourselves as part of a system which we collectively reproduce
We can also ask why Cockshott tries to combine Althusser and Dennett style anglo analytic philosophy. The through-line is their rejection of subjectivity. As Althusser said in “Essays in self criticism”, “History is a process, and a process without a subject’. Both Althusser and Dennett argue that the notion of a stable, essential self is misleading: for Althusser, it’s because subjectivity is formed through ideological interpellation (early) or chance encounters (post ‘Philosophy of the encounter’); for Dennett, it’s because the self is a “center of narrative gravity” rather than an entity with intrinsic essence. Althusser’s aleatory materialism suggests that structures (like social systems) have no underlying essence and are sustained only as long as certain contingent conditions allow them to persist. Dennett would likely agree with this framing when applied to consciousness: he argues that the mind is a “user-illusion,” a stable but ultimately non-substantial structure. Just as Althusser sees social structures as fleeting and contingent, Dennett sees the self and consciousness as stable illusions—“useful fictions” generated by physical processes rather than by any substantial, intrinsic essence.
The difference is that Cockshott takes this further than thinkers like Althusser, Badiou, or others in denying the existence of the philosophical subject althogether, collapsing them into a Dennett-ist style emergentism. Of course he also references the soviet jurist Pashukanis to explain the juridical origin of the notion of a philosophical subject, which to him is merely a reflection of the feudal superstructure which has persisted in philosophical traditions.
>Monarchy was the overwhelming prevailing order in Europe until the French Republic was stably established as an exception in 1870. The language of European philosophy was formed in monarchy where all but the sovereign were legally subjects, so the term subject enters legal use and then philosophical dialogue as a synonym for persons.
<But being a subject is not a position of freedom, but, as the name implies, one of feudal subordination. To attribute it as a linguistic category … is an illusion, an a-historic and specifically bourgeois republican misinterpretation of the term. The entire legal and coercive structure of the European monarchies, real laws, currencies, armies, navies, prisons and courts were a practical demonstration of this.
>The … linguistic constitution of the subject actually comes down to no more than this insignificant pun on grammatical terminology. It pretends to give a material support to the idealist philosophical category `subject’, but on examination turns out to be just empty.
<the subject … is just the Cartesian mind or Christian soul.
>>2002473there is no fixed subject, but there is subjectivity nonetheless. what is missed here is the concept of mediation which also serves a first-principles (or metaphysical) approach to society. marx himself was metaphysical where it concerned grounding the social substance between commodities as abstract labour. you cant quantitatively measure abstract labour in-itself, but still qualify its universal (or necessary) precondition in modes of production.
the same thing can be asserted about subjectivity. there can be different subjects, but all still conform to the universal condition of selfhood.
the extreme historicism of abandoning subjectivity otherwise makes knowledge in-itself an impossibility by particularising knowledge as something inherently contemporary to each age.
also, to speak of the "objective" is to already be entered into a particular subjectivity by its mediation in language, culture, etc. nonetheless, there is the synonymity of subjectivity across cultures which is not lost in translation.
KANTIAN MARXISTS ARE PSEUDS: WHY THE CONCEPT OF “QUALIA” AND SUBJECTIVITY IS BASED ON CRYPTO-CARTESIAN AND CRYPTO-CHRISTIAN ONTIC ASSUMPTIONS
Daniel Dennett has a much better idea of cognition that german idealist pseuds!
According to Kant (a Christian non materialist), the mind has a priori structures – categories like space, time, and causality – that mediate and organize all sensory input, making coherent experience possible. Instead of assuming that knowledge conforms to the external world (as empiricists suggested), he claims that the external world as we know it must conform to the structures of our mind. In other words, our experience is shaped by how our mind actively organizes sensory input using concepts that are inherent to the mind itself. Thus, we don't derive these basic organizing principles (like space, time, and causality) from experience, they are what enable us to have coherent experiences in the first place.
Now, if the ‘mind’ is just an information-processing system like a computer, we might ask: Could a machine "learn" these categories (or others) from raw data without explicit human instruction? This would challenge Kant’s claim that these categories must be innate rather than learned through experience. Well, that already does happen.
In machine learning, neural networks “learn” without human-defined categories like "causality" or "space" explicitly programmed into them. Instead, they learn patterns from data and store their results as weights and biases, often in binary blob form which is neither readable or comprehensible by a human being. And before you say this is merely academic, automated theorem provers are decades old. As are examples of computer programs which can deduce the laws of physics by watching a pendulum swing without a shred of knowledge about physics or geometry. When/if general AI is developed I’m willing to bet it won’t be because some AI scientists and programmers decided to program Kantian transcendental categories into the AI, it will be based on some other model entirely or more likely a combination of different models.
I’m sure someone will argue, well what about human minds?
Well, Daniel Dennett’s concept of the “user-illusion” resembles Kant’s idea of mediation in that both suggest we do not have direct access to the world “as it is” (the noumenon, in Kant’s terms). However, where Kant argues that we cannot know the thing-in-itself because of the mind’s mediating categories, Dennett contends that what we perceive as “reality” is a kind of user-friendly simulation produced by the brain. This illusion does not represent any essential or intrinsic structure imposed by the mind but rather serves as an adaptive approximation designed to simplify complex sensory input and make it actionable.
Our cognitive faculties are shaped by evolutionary pressures to “filter” information in a way that promotes survival and reproduction. For instance, our tendency to see objects as stable, continuous entities (a phenomenon Kant would attribute to the category of substance) is a result of evolutionary adaptation that helps us identify and interact with entities in our environment efficiently. Cognitive mediation is therefore not fixed or universal in the Kantian sense. The mind doesn’t impose logically necessary a priori structures on perception. It’s just that certain interpretive frameworks (like seeing an object as “having a purpose”) are evolutionarily advantageous and help us predict behavior in complex environments.
For Kant, the mediation of experience implies a form of inner synthesis where disparate sensory data is unified by the categories. However consciousness is not a single, unified experience but an emergent property of multiple distributed processes. This decentralized view of consciousness suggests that there is no central “place” where experience is synthesized and presented (the so-called ‘cartesian theater’ – an error which began as noted earlier, with Descartes). Rather, the brain uses parallel processing to create an impression of continuity and coherence.
Kant’s model relies on the concept of the noumenon, or “thing-in-itself,” which exists independently of our perception but is ultimately unknowable. Dennett rejects this idea. From his perspective, the concept of the noumenon is unnecessary because our experience is entirely explainable through physical processes and adaptive mechanisms. He would argue that there is no need for an unknowable “real” world behind our perception, as our evolved cognitive structures provide us with all the tools we need to operate successfully within the world we experience.
To conclude, we don’t need a metaphysical basis for knowledge any more than we need a metaphysical subject. Insomuch as mediating cognitive structures in the human mind exist at all they are the result of evolutionary processes and pragmatic adaptions. There is no need for such things as ‘Mind’ in the Cartesian sense, Kantian transcendental categories or noumenon. All aspects of human experience, including its mediated qualities, can be understood through the lens of naturalistic, scientific processes without appealing to transcendental structure. Furthermore, there is also no evidence that even this naturalistic/physicalist mediation is universal since as with the previous example of machine learning and AI, cognition with different (or possibly no) mediating structures is also possible.
Althusser was wise to question Hegel, but to really get to the bottom of things we must problematize not only Hegel, but Kant as well.
>>2003398Not quite, I don't think dialectical logic is based not accepting the law of non-contradiction as such
Rather, if you look at Aristotle's conditions on the law of non-contradiction (from memory, its that A&~A is false when the terms have a stable meaning, A ~A take place at the same time, etc.)
So for example, dialectical logic deals can deal with the case where A & ~A are taking place at different times.
Eg. A: I am eating soup.
If we include time A&~A is not necessarily false, given the case where I am eating soup at time t & I am not eating soup at time t+x, x=\=0.
In fact, it may happen that it is the very fact that I am eating soup at time t that leads me go not eating soup at time t+x (because I am full of soup for example).
I think this kind of thinking makes a lot sense of things like the negation of the negation not being equivalent to the original statement, because what is being negated is actually something like a composite or very concrete predicate (eg. I am eating a sandwich at time t; I am not walking at time t+1 as I am taking a breath; I am not taking a breath at time t+2 nor eating a sandwich because I am drinking a soda)
>>1993002What's cockshott's problem with free will? It's not even something relevant to economics.
Like Im willing to give you commies everything, but the whole "no free will" is the most NPC bullshit I ever came across.
>>2010753lol really, THAT's your problem? out of everything? Free will is easily bullshit if you're a physicalist/materialist. Its literally a leftover from christianity. The whole idea of free will was to explain why evil exists if there's an all powerful all good God. Its because you have a 'choice' to commit evil. If you think that a human being has an eternal soul it makes sense but otherwise no.
>>2010840 edits a fedora on cockshott, but he is basically right. If the only thing that exists is matter or 'matter in motion' then human thought comes from a human brain. Physics determines what happens by causality or quantum randomness. In order to believe in free will you'd have to explain why human brain cells, out of all the other collections of matter in the universe, somehow have the ability to override causality and go against it and do what it wasn't suppose to do or something. And thats when you get into the schizo rationalizations like Penrose's idea of quantum microtubules in the brain or whatever.
Basically, there is no way to save free will without resorting to reinventing cartesian dualism, hyper-computational physical forces, or some other really esoteric shit (at least from a scientific point of view).
>>2010840Did he actually say that? If he did kek.
>>2010878>If you think that a human being has an eternal soul it makes sense but otherwise no.I have a materialist outlook on things, which is why I cannot make judgement on "souls" or what not. I only made a statement about free will which I can only prove exists in me. That is, I cannot prove someone else has free will, but I'm telling you from my experience, I have free will. I don't have free will when I'm dreaming (sleeping), but I have a modicum of experience (awareness) that I am assuming is what animals have, but then again, It's just a hypothetical since I have not studied it.
>If the only thing that exists is matter or 'matter in motion' then human thought comes from a human brain.What is "matter" by our colloquial understanding of it, is not the only thing that exists? Again, as a materialist, I only focus on that which can be interacted with, or interacts with what is material. I don't know what exists beyond (if it even does), but I don't make conclusive statements on those.
>Basically, there is no way to save free will without resorting to reinventing cartesian dualism, hyper-computational physical forces, or some other really esoteric shit (at least from a scientific point of view).Does everything have to be reduced to our current scientific understanding which is mostly consensus based anyway? What if Descartes was right? What if a new scientific paradigm (as has happened in the past) changes our perception of material reality? What if Einstein, Bohr and Max Born are discredited in the future along with quantum physics like Aristotle's theory of matter? I don't need a peer-revYOOd paper to tell me I am a being, I am aware that I am a being and that I make/not make choices. I still don't understand why most communists have this hang-up over free will as if they don't have countless examples of their compatriots clearly making choices that show the existence of agency and not a result of blind reaction to external stimuli.
>>2010901Proof requires coherent reference and derivation from already established axioms. Those axioms are what is assumed to be true a priori. You can have relative proof via some system, but you cannot have absolute universal proof. Such is the blessing/curse of reality.
>>1985242Humans are machines - "natural machines", but there is nothing existentially special about humans or subjectivity. That is something different from saying "the mathematical work of Godel is irrelevant because humans are computers and computers are human". Any restriction of computation in computers applies just as much to human faculties, thought, and operations.
The problem with lazy comparisons is that humans were not built to be computers or reduced easily to such. If you did operationalize everything a human body did, you are dealing with a very different construct with billions of cells, that adapted to its environment throughout its lifetime and had parents doing likewise, stretching back countless generations. Computers are specifically engineered to do one thing - rote calculations - and their history is extraneous to the task. Humans, whether they like it or not, are stuck with their faculties, and certainly they engage in market activity and planning as if their actions were a going concern and morally valued by them. You could make a computer which is functionally like a human with remarkable accuracy, which asks the same questions we do about economics and acts as an economic, rational agent.
Biggest problem with planning is that usually, the economic plans suck donkey balls, and everyone who has this plan pushed on them knows it. If these plans were scrutinized by any public inquiry, we'd see that the managerial, computational strata is largely unnecessary and can be trivialized in any era. That was never the problem. The problem is that a few assholes insisted we have to respect their scams because they hold a position of authority over us and society, and society was claimed by them as their monopoly. You're always going to have this fear with any large institution, for reasons which cannot be solved with any planning - if you believe human avarice and moral foulness is natural and eternal and necessary for economic life to continue. If you don't, then you're asking a very different question. Managing resource inflows and outflows is trivial in any era - humans would not have managed any civilization is computation was the intractable problem. There are limits to computation - rulers do not have immediate access to all information in their domain, and this has been a persistent weakness of states up to today. Generally, though, the rulers have sufficient knowledge of what humans do in those domains, and has every right to collect that information. Nothing about the universe requires the state or its officers to pretend they're blind and retarded, which has always been the Germanic conceit. It's not as if we're too stupid to see what is being done in front of our faces.
>>2011668>why would someone voluntarily choose>chooseYou answered it anon. Your choice of language betrays you.
>>2011327>thats not really materialism?Materialism is dependent on our existing knowledge, technical capabilities and interaction with the material world (and also conceptual framework of understanding ie. caloric vs atomic). At the present, we can confirm we do not fully know the material world because we always find out something new that forces readjustment in conceptualization. If you lock in materialism to your current understanding of the world then you will not progress. You need to make space for the unknown with an objective to figure it out in the future (if possible). Once it becomes known (quantified/categorized), then it is factored into any future materialist analysis.
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