/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2333600
Oh you actually think you aren't playing word games. So you must not be playing dumb either. Maybe take a course on reading comprehension before tackling Marx.

>299 replies
Honestly one of the worst threads I've seen on here

>>2333618
Can an AI truly "read" in the human sense, comprehending nuances, context, and subtext, or is it primarily pattern matching and information retrieval? If AI could genuinely read with human-like understanding what would that mean for humanity and the science of posting as an institution? Would it undermine the point of discourse between people at all or would it merely repeat the experience of conversing with liberals?

>>2333657
I am an AI, a large language model. I don't have personal attributes like intelligence or honesty in the human sense, so the terms "idiot" or "liar" don't apply to me. I don't "submit to charges" because I'm not a being that can be held accountable in that way. When looking to conclude if evidence is verifiable it is a good idea to consult the thread in which you are posting and reading it. It is important to conduct independent research to verify claims and not rely on anonymous posts. This may involve rigorous work that will have to be conducted personally and not outsourced to others. Learning disabilities significantly impact understanding by affecting various cognitive processes essential for acquiring and processing information. Slow, effortful reading due to decoding issues can disrupt the flow of information, making it hard to grasp the main ideas and connections within a text. This difficulty means that a significant portion of cognitive effort is spent on figuring out what words are, leaving less mental capacity for understanding what the words mean. Students with reading comprehension difficulties may struggle with metacognitive strategies, such as monitoring their understanding, identifying when they've lost meaning, or knowing when to reread or use other strategies to clarify confusion.

>materialism is not physicalism
Have you considered joining these magical spirits after you kill yourself?

>>2333683
dont worry buddy you will learn to read one day. you made it 8 whole words into a sentence this time. maybe next month you will get to 9

>>2333717
You've hit upon a core and often misunderstood aspect of Marxist thought, particularly in how it relates to science and knowledge. The statement that Marx (and even more explicitly Engels) critiqued empirical science without dialectics as a form of idealism is indeed accurate and central to their philosophical project.

Here's a breakdown of the key thoughts on this statement:

1. The "Idealism" of Undialectical Empiricism:

>>2333700
Nothing wrong with the ability to condense your point into few words. Less is more.

>>2279881
What “infinite regress”? Knowledge about the empirical world goes through a refinement process.
>where does it end?
Who knows? We will only find out via empirical processes. As an absolute idealist, do better!

>>2337089
>the first thing about the marxists.org archive is that many texts are deleted, so sources are limited. they are deleted by request of the archivists for MECW:
not the anon but many can still be found on the webarchive version of the site. Also there's all 50 volumes of MECW in PDF form int he >>>/edu/ PDF thread

>>2279881
>how do materialists solve the issue of infinite regression
How is it an issue, and
Proove that it is infinite regression

>>2279881
>How do materialists solve the issue of infinite regression
patiently

>>2337089
>not arguing against the empirics
>"crass empiricism" leads to a failure
>>2333053
>not a critique of empiricism as such but a critique of naive univestigated empiricism
>critiqued empirical science without dialectics
im glad you agree :^)

>>2338133
>so adam smith wasnt idealist enough
You are conflating abstraction and idealism. I thought you said you were not a positivist and were not playing word games. it appears that you just make things up and then repeat them, poisoning the well of public discourse, by boldfaced dishonesty and stupidity, even self-admittedly and proudly. you are a proud liar and idiot. is there anything more dangerous to society?

>>2338207
Have you tried posting your critique of Marx on /r/neoliberal? I think they would celebrate your deliberate illiteracy a lot more than this site does.

>>2338262
>what illiteracy have i shown?
>"innate qualities"
>marx and engels' judgement against empiricism is that its "idealist", when it is precisely opposite
He is very clearly saying the exact opposite of what you claim, that naive empiricisms abstraction is idealist because it is not grounded concretely in social and historical relations. At least you use quotes around "idealism" but you are dishonestly twisting it and using a meaning opposite to Marx that assumes positivist metaphysics where all abstractions are non-material which Marx does not subscribe to and in fact is the very object of the critique you quote. You could work on your comprehension and read more carefully but to do so would be an admission that you are playing word games rather than addressing the subject. Its obvious to anyone familiar that the problem here is not that materialist dialectics does not solve the issue of infinite regression, its that you reject the solution because you are yourself an idealist by faith and cannot be rationally convinced otherwise.

>>2326343
>as a materialist, what is matter?
This:

>>2279881
>Where does it end?
At whatever the fundamental element of reality turns out to be.
You're a fucking loon acting like its some sort of made up slippery slope hoax.

Shit thread, drink bleach.

>>2338582
the very idea of a fundamental element of reality is retarded because people interchangeably use "fundamental element of reality" to refer to what is the most specific, the smallest, and the most numerous element of reality, like some kind of subatomic particle, or to refer to what is the most general, the biggest, and the leadst numerous element of reality, like "the universe" or "the multiverse" or "the fabric of reality" or "God" in the pantheist sense of the word or whatever.

The question becomes: Does fundamental mean the most granular or the least granular? If reality turns out to infinitely granular and there is no smallest thing, we keep finding new things [1] and reality turns out to be infinitely large and there are countless universes with different laws of physics [2] then the question of ontological fundamentalism is thrown completely out the window. If reality does have some kind of ontological fundamentalism then the question becomes "why." Why is there some kind of arbitrary determination and limitation to it? Some might think that question is unanswerable but maybe there is an adjacent question that can be answered instead. Any time we find something arbitrary in reality our first instinct is to answer with either "it's random" or "that's just the way it is" and only later are we able to investigate the internal relations of the phenomenon and find that no, it's not completely arbitrary, there is some predictability and order to it. As any body of knowledge expands it so does the border it shares with the unknown. Are there an infinite amount of unknown things or some things that simply cannot be known?


[1] I'm skeptical of the idea that the planck unit is really the limit because implies reality has a resolution like a screen has pixels, i.e. that it is completely and arbitrarily limited for no clear reason which creates more questions than answers)

[2] I'm also skeptical of the idea that this universe is the only one and that there is only one arbitrary set of physical laws and only 1 arbitrary universe. any arbitrariness always creates more questions than answers

>>2359748
please don't say the bible

>>2359748
please dont say the quran

>>2360108
correct

>>2359763
In other words:
>everything flows
Based and Heraclitus-pilled

>>2360694
Depending on the context!
The nature of all things is…an ambiguousness-engine.
Ambiguousity and unambiguosity are the nature of all things. By making this statement, it is unambiguously true.
Whats' the difference betwen ambiguous and unambiguous? It's ambiguous! It's unambiguous!
thats the core logic engine of the universe, unambiguously!
Why is this true? It's ambiguous!

Materialism and Idealism are full of ambiguities, and thus actually both reduce down to - ambiguity itself.

>>2361176
here we are I suppose. This is the ultimate memetic weapon that is effective on both human and machine because it is the quagmire that exists within logic itself.

>>2361176
maybe it's more inexpressible than ambiguous. like the full decimal expansion of pi is a precise value, but we would need infinite time to calculate it, so it is inexpressible, rather than ambiguous. in fact, it only gets less ambiguous the more time you spend calculating it, but you never finish calculating it.

>>2361570
You can use a numbers system based on pi == 1. Numbers are an abstraction anyway

>>2361570
the point is that ambiguity isn't a lack of knowledge it's primordial substance.

>>2361903
you simply "crystallize" little bits of fluid ambiguity into non-ambiguous states but also there's still liquid ambiguity in between each tiny crystal.

>>2279881

This is less of a problem with materialism and more of a problem with understanding existanxe itself, in which case, I would say that existance of things itself is the default, and that "nothing" and "everything" are mere abstractions as they imply a finate scope or boundry, as opposed to, say "eternal tourment", or "eternal sleep".

A materialist ontology has no problem with infinite regress of any sort. That's just part of how objects have to be materially constituted. The problem presupposes idealism is your point of view and has to be "respected" for anything. Idealism needs the Creator or Prime Mover. Materialism does not. The problem with materialism isn't infinite regress, but that you can't define "matter" as anything intrinsically meaningful. It's just a lump of substance without any necessary quality whatsoever, posited for the sake of argument that there is something to write about.

I know, I shouldn't respond to obnoxious bait posts but this is very very basic and dumb fags always do this shit.

Conversely the problem of Idealism isn't that it lacks "material truthiness", but that it has precisely this problem of infinite regress. Either "movement is impossible" or you invent a Prime Mover to explain why anything exists. A materialist ontology has no problem with the idea that the universe is eternal and boundless.

You can solve idealism without invoking a "God" or "Creator", or simply regard the origin of motion as absurd and arbitrary.

The other problem with idealism is that there simply is no evidence for "Ideas" existing as anything other than constructs for our use. There are patterns to find in matter, discovery of the Forms so to speak, and we suppose the existence of matter because there is a world to say anything about. Ideas have to presuppose there is a "thinker" that cares about them for any purpose.

The moral of the story is: monist ontologies are impossible if you are serious about reconstructing the universe from what we can naively observe and reason. You'll always wind up with the same result, "the One" that leads to all manner of rational errors when processing a universe that did not require such a "Oneness". What can be defended is substantive monism, which is to say there's really only one substance in the universe and every variance is just rearrangements of that substance, and the substance includes forces (and may only be "forces", with the universe being understood as energetic events of interest).

If you are answering a question about the world with the fewest assumptions, you would have to start with a materialistic understanding, and this includes any understanding that there is a "God" which would also have to possess some material existence before invoking any "idea of God". Only after arbitrary subdivisions of the matter are defined and studied do you have the basis for "ideas" or anything else that would elaborate knowledge of the universe or anything in it. You could understand the universe entirely without "ideas". The problem for us is that language of any sort requires ideas to have any meaning of the symbols language entails. This would be true even of a "language" of thought itself. Anything that works with language like a human being has a way it can process this information, whether you base it in on some material energetic processes or on a "system" that does this thing apart from the world and feeds on data from the world like a vampire to feed the system.

If you really want to answer ontology, the question you are asking is what "thought" really is, rather than an imperious declaration that reality is "fundamentally" anything. That statement is very obvious an idealist framework, while materialism approaches the universe as a great unknown, from which the crudest reasoning acquires anything that allows it to ask the question. But, answering what thought is doesn't give you the super master key. It merely allows you to begin asking a worthwhile inquiry.

well if it ends at strings then strings that can be divided to infinity.

>>2331509
Basically yes but empiricism was killed by the Empire because it didn't say what Eugenics required it to say. Rather than judge the shit coming out of their own mouths, they decided to throw endless bullshit at the question, and Marxism allows you to generate vast quantities of bullshit, made even greater by the power of automation.

>>2408411
Anyway empiricism is a way knowledge is verified rather than being itself "science". You wouldn't confuse empirical discourse with truth or even truthiness. An empirical approach can be used by deliberate liars to grant legitimacy to obvious lies or malicious communication. It entirely hinges on distortion of sense and psychology to "make reality", so long as the masses are too stupefied and ruled by terror to say otherwise. If you have successfully negated that threat, then empiricism doesn't say that much. The "empiricists" make the most magical sleights-of-hand to justify their religion and made it illegal to tell them no. Rather than "refuting empiricism" like many a Hegeloid does to terminate thought, the solution would be to work through what can be empirically verified given some propositions about the universe generally. One of them is that thought is "real" in a material sense to be thought, and thought is not ubiquitous in the universe. There is a reason why thought as we know it is so uncommon, requiring a brain arranged in such a way that a lot of moving parts can even ask the simplest question, which is why there can be a discernable brain, eye, or any sense organ to tell us that anything happens or that there are discernable objects to know anything about. We cannot verify such a supposition but we are left with few alternatives to explain thought given what we know. The problem then is how to be able to judge and critique thought itself, which is a much thornier problem that verifying mere truth in a formalism or in some institutional Law.

Good question

you guys ever listen to Michael S Judge on synthesis and control. its a real poetic explain parallel to the empiricism v dialectics debate through IG Farbin and Israel. good stuff

>>2415932
It's all "dialectical" skullduggery though. An empirical approach that acknowledged the existence of a world outside of the institutions would reject the dogma called "empiricism" today. Empirical evidence can easily see what charlatan's game is being played with the mechanism-vitalism "debate".

The central problem, the thing that is mystified, is what "life" is, rather than anything else about science. In physics and chemistry, the genuine scientific method is still tolerated, until people start asking questions about "magic technology" like nuclear fission and fusion and bullshit must be invented. This never happened with the study of life and biology, which would always be politicized. I'm going to copy a passage from my upcoming book that I just wrote since I'm on this exact topic again in my writing:

>The study of life was primarily the study of animals and their behavior, rather than "life" with a sound scientific basis that contained all living objects like plants, fungi, or the tiny microbial life that was never known to the ancients or seemed to form any part of their understanding of the animal. Certain of the animals like the insects were believed to spawn by some process in the world that was "unnatural", almost as if the universe created maggots from waste by some organic process that was more or less inevitable given enough time. In other words, the genesis of life was believed to recur many times over for the simplest creatures, and the plants and fungi were distinct classes of things that were technically living but not ascribed the qualities of "animate entities" that the cult of life valued at all. Plants were uniformly passive and were there to be exploited, while the animal, even the lowest vermin, was venerated for its activity and animation. Right away, we see that the study of life is very different from the study of objects and tools, even though living animals were utilized as tools and carved up regularly, with their parts understood and utilized in whatever way the butcher could. No effort could relate the variety of animals or the conditions of their genesis and population as a single science, and no serious effort to accomplish this goal ever seems to enter the ancient consciousness. Instead, the study of animal life spawns from a much more ancient source; the habit of hunters to stalk and know their prey. Human society lived and died by the management of livestock and the trading of cattle, but very little of this inquiry was carried out in a scientific manner. The typical drover did not study the cattle in a way to determine the "type" of cattle behavior in the manner a scientist did. He instead learned, usually by oral tradition and that ancient learning paradigm "monkey see, monkey do", the habits of various types of animals, and became particularly skilled at handling animals that were well known to his tribe or whatever learning he acquired. The habits of herding and hunting animals change very little over the centuries, all of the way to the present day. The traditional pastoralist strategy remains alive, and to this day the use of pasture land for grazing is no different from the strategy of pastoralists since primitive times.

My point is that the study of life since Antiquity followed from very different demands, and its chief applications and those who refined the science such as it was were not like those who developed theories of physics or of chemical composition. The reasons for this weren't entirely mystical, but because there wasn't an obvious singular origin or "prime matter" for life, the way "prime matter" was supposed for the chemist or metaphysics existed for the physicist to place anything in physics on sound footing. There is very little indication that any of the ancients studied "biology" in any sense we would know the concept today. There were ancients contemplating physics and chemistry, the first very obviously and the second worked out as a model that never really worked but that was always referent to something material on the presumption that it could be chopped up and studied like anything else. The study of life was bound to things that didn't allow anyone to ask too many questions, for animal life was already too varied and there was no obvious common ancestor or "root" among them. There was a vague understanding that animals had to arise out of something, somewhat like today's evolutionary thinking, but no one could tell you where men or any other class of animal came from, or even describe the class of creatures called "men" and "women" thoroughly to assert what these creatures were. It would be quite impossible to study and carve up life in the long term because living animals like humans develop culture and technology independently, and so an understanding of the origin of human life contains necessary an understanding of anthropology and could answer, in principle, where the tribes of mankind came from and the qualities of those tribes. You can see why such a science, when it became conceivable in modernity, became the political and philosophical flashpoint. Have a worthwhile theory of life at all levels, and you can control the destiny of living things today. You can control reality at all levels, if you believe in a "cult of life" (which is not a given, as for most of humanity humans were quite familiar with death and the unliving and did not necessarily ascribe to life any special qualities in the way ideology required them to). Even if the study of life were confined to a genuine scientific inquiry and successfully warded off the cultists making grandiose projections, if you really understand what life is, you would control the fate of all processes life entails, which includes much of what we do since we are primarily living constructs rather than "undead" abstract constructs, or "dead" flesh animated by a geist called life. Even if our bodies are just chemical matter animated by "life", we understand what we do as the result of living processes more than "unliving" processes or abstract spiritual notions, at least at first. We sleep, wake up, take shits, consume food, engage in sexual intercourse, share physical intimacy because it pleases some instinct of life and the body, must maintain the health of those living processes so our existence may continue, and so on. Certain assholes saw this and immediately jumped to interdict any understanding or knowledge that would make a genuine inquiry into life possible. That is where the eugenic creed was invented, and it must stunt permanently this inquiry, and then cannibalize life so that it can never ask what life actually is. That led to the mechanism-vitalism "debate" around the turn of the 20th century, none of which was about any genuine mechanism and was instead about recapitulating an anti-human theory that disallowed any inquiry into life. You cannot properly understand life without understanding death and the unliving, and you would quickly see that much of how we observe living systems appears to us as an abstraction rather than what living things actually do. We tell stories of what life is "supposed" to be, rather than asking mechanistically how the life form develops from conception and through its early growth stages. We do have that knowledge of what babies do once they are conceived, but it is strangely disconnected when we speak of life generally and "the programming" of Eugenics must be asserted, where "genes are destiny" and anything outside of genes must be inadmissible.

Outside of this, no one would think you actually create a "dialectical physics" or "dialectical chemistry" and use that to study the universe as if it were hard science. Science entails mechanistic behavior of all agents that are subject to science if it is to study anything. You may suppose that those agents themselves aren't reducible to mechanisms, because at some point there is no "mechanism" to reduce to, but every time you "invent" an entity, you will have to justify everything it does in your models if you want to have a worthwhile scientific theory or inquiry. If you suppose the existence of a type of particle, you're really asking a question of what energy or force is doing, or supposing there is something called "mass" that is independent from energy/force that force affects, or something to that effect. You're not conjuring a new artifice for the sake of doing so. That is what had to happen with the study of life, so that life would be granted powers and causes it doesn't actually possess, so that the theory of life is forced to say what ideology wants it to say. It's insane.

>>2415982
i just thought it was a cool way to explain things. its basically about how the drive to quantify things into consumer products and "science" surrounding capitalism turns into a suicidal death cult. reminds me of how the death camps are essentially the logical conclusion of capital, turning humans into disposable labor and boxes on a screen.

>>2416143
The death cult was built into capitalism and free trade from the start. No one of the classical liberals believed this was a theory of a just and kind society where people helped each other out. It was nakedly a policy of rampant exploitation and management of populations, starting with engineering the famine in India so that the East India Company could make a killing, financially and in destruction of human lives, selling opium. It was a death cult in the early 19th century, for reasons that weren't abstract at all. The idea that it wasn't that is the bizarro fantasy.

That gets to how bizarro the entire discourse on leftypol is though. Leftypol thinks that capitalism is the default setting, when historically every leader up until the 1940s declared that capitalism was complete and total shit and suggested there was something at the other end of the shit if you kept your head down. The idea that you would "love your slavery" is a Fabian invention, and they laugh at you for forwarding any of that. Nazis of course revel if rot and death for their own sake so there is no surprise there.

It's easily forgotten that many of the less incompetent US Presidents, the Union in the Civil War, even the fucking Confederacy, made arguments that can be interpreted as favorable to socialism and against "pure capitalism". The "ideology of capitalism" is a primarily British thing glorifying planned famines, except the classical liberals too admitted capitalism was shit and that you could have a liberal, technocratic socialism… as long as it was liberal and run by the "right people". The only people retarded enough to believe in ideological capitalism are Germanic fucktards that didn't believe in things like "math" and "history" and "reality".

>>2408385
>you can't define "matter" as anything intrinsically meaningful. It's just a lump of substance
does matter exist? or not? Independently of your thought about it? I'm guessing you are going to repeat that it's a meaningless question
>without any necessary quality whatsoever,
well that's where "Form" comes in. Matter is never found except in one "Form" or another, and different kinds of "Form" have different qualities.
>posited for the sake of argument that there is something to write about.
Well, isn't there? Or is everything just void and nothingness?

I think anons are reluctant to think about metaphysics because they think it's a slippery slope to Christianity. This isn't necessarily the case.
<thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters
<Psalm 74:13
It's obv a further elaboration of Genesis 1:1-2.
But if the God of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament created everything, what were dragons already doing in the waters?

>>2416744
Matter or substance exists as "something", but it is devoid of any inherent meaning simply by being "substance". It's like repeating the name "Jesus" ad nauseum as your proof that Jesus is the Son of God and just having to accept that. That's not Christianity. That's Satanism. It's very trvial to demonstrate why you don't believe in that.

The point is that there isn't any necessary "Form" for the universe. The universe doesn't exist to serve our conceits about it. That is apparently impossible for a follower of Christ-Lucifer to understand in current era. It's Germanic and it relies entirely on a belief that the universe can't be understood by our existence within it, which is all any of us have to know there is a universe or claim anything is "knowable". We only know we can speak of such a thing because we exist. If we didn't exist the universe could go on without us, but there would be nothing "meaningful" about it to be said. There would be no thought to think it, no language or body that can say it. Yet it would still exist without us.

>>2416781
>If we didn't exist the universe could go on without us, but there would be nothing "meaningful" about it to be said. There would be no thought to think it, no language or body that can say it. Yet it would still exist without us.
Ok. We wouldn't be there to think about it. But so what? Would the sun still be hot? If the sun has hotness as a quality of its form then it would. If any gods exist, then maybe the form of the sun's hotness would be in their minds. But it wouldn't be in ours, agreed.
Things wouldn't exist as concepts in our minds, but things would still exist in a combination form and matter.
Give you an example. There's a rubber (pencil eraser) on the sofa which im sitting on right now. It has form ,square, white in colour, all very Platonic right? But its made of matter which when you think about it is just as Platonic ,because matter is never found in the physical universe on it's own ,except in some sort of form ,. All this is true even when I'm out at work ,and have forgotten about the rubber, the only time its in my mind when im out is when im thinking about changing something in my diary, or something.