>>2553093<Well as the other user said, the claim that ontological monism is false or unscientific is just like, an outright lie? Well, at the very least, it's not materialist; materialism is the view that only matter and physical processes are real. All phenomena, including consciousness, thoughts, and emotions, are the result of material interactions and can be explained through physical means, rejecting the existence of non-physical entities like souls or spirits. So yes, it's philosophical monism, but the difference is that materialism/physicalism is like a type or substance monism, which says all stuff is one kind of stuff, and that's not the same as eastern mysticism, which says all stuff is literally one thing, OR emanated from it like neoplatonism's "the one". That's clearly idealism and possibly even religious.
Classical atomism is the earliest fully developed form of materialism in the Western tradition, basically the ontology of having reduced reality to a fundamental unit (or collection of units) which can be subdivided no further. A sort of ontological reductionism is built in and sort of has to be.
All differences in quality, experience, or being are differences in the arrangement and motion of those same basic units. That’s what makes it systematically materialist: no appeal to form, spirit, teleology, or mind as independent realities.
Hegel's dialectical derivations amount to conceptual overreach, or, in computational terms, that he’s trying to extract more semantic information from a system than it formally contains. From a modern computational or information-theoretic standpoint, that looks like violating conservation of information. Hegel’s claim that thought develops itself into all categories of being is like claiming a finite formal system can generate its own expansion indefinitely. But according to mathematical logic, such self-grounding is impossible if you’re treating reasoning as formal, rule-bound, and finitely axiomatized. Therefore, Hegel's procedure either smuggles in extra information or abandons formal rigor and becomes rhetoric or mysticism.
There's a reason Hegel's method hasn't been formalized after all these years. Hegel cannot be both right and immune to formal scrutiny. The reason he seems immune is not because he transcends formalism, but because his method depends on concealing informal, semantic imports that would become visible (and falsifiable) if translated into a formal system.
If you think of reasoning systems as having information conservation, then Hegel’s "self-generation of categories" looks impossible in principle. When he moves from Being to Nothing to Becoming, and onward through the Logic, he treats each new concept as necessitated by contradiction in the preceding one. A formalized version of that process would have to define the initial axioms precisely, define valid inferential rules, and then show that "Becoming" is derivable from them. But you can’t actually do that. The transitions depend on semantic intuition ("the concept of pure Being, when thought, is indistinguishable from Nothing"), i.e., on human interpretation, not rule-governed inference. The moment you make the rules explicit, you see they don’t entail the next step. Hence, Hegel’s system needs to live in an informal, discursive space to maintain the illusion of necessity.
The parallel is that Hilbert’s program, the attempt to ground mathematics as a self-contained logical deduction from axioms, looked a lot like Hegel’s dream of reason self-grounding itself. But Godel and later Turing and Chaitin showed that no sufficiently rich formal system can capture all truths about itself. Any system complex enough to represent arithmetic will have true statements it cannot prove. And, as Chaitin framed it, you can’t get more algorithmic information out than you put in. So if you interpret Hegel’s "self-developing Logic" as an attempt to found all conceptual truth on the dialectical unfolding of pure thought, then it’s structurally the same ambition Hilbert had, and refuted by the same logic.
This isn't just analytic pedantry; it's a profound epistemological point. If Hegel's dialectic were really necessary in the sense he claims, it should be mechanically reconstructible because logical necessity is rule-bound. If it’s not rule-bound, then what he's calling necessity is actually rhetorical or phenomenological persuasion. That doesn’t make it worthless; it can still capture insights about conceptual evolution, but it ceases to be a logically "self-grounding science." So saying "Hegel is fine; he’s just informal" doesn't save him. Hegel's informality is exactly what lets him pretend his derivations are necessary when, under any formalization, they would fail to be so.
In modern information theory, randomness is one of the only recognized ways to get “new information” into a system. Randomness is epistemic novelty from outside the formal closure. Hegel, of course, denies that the real dialectic has an outside. The "negative," contradiction itself, is supposed to generate novelty immanently, without external input. That novelty could arise from purely self-contained rational contradiction, without external contingency. But that’s the very thing that is impossible.
From the computational standpoint, contradiction =/= randomness. Contradiction is syntactic conflict inside a rule set, not the arrival of new, unencoded information. Unless you relax the closure of the system, contradictions just produce inconsistency, not genuine novelty. So if you model Hegel's dialectic as a formal process, contradiction doesn’t add information; it destroys consistency. If you model it as a semantic process, then novelty only appears because we interpret the contradiction creatively, which is exactly the "smuggling" problem critics accuse him of.
That's what makes Althusser's aleatory materialism so appealing. Althusser's late philosophy rejects this closure altogether. His materialisme aleatoire is an ontology of contingent encounters, modeled explicitly on Epicurus’ atomic swerve; atoms falling in the void that randomly collide and stick together, forming worlds without any teleology or preordained order. In this view, there is no pre-existing essence or goal (no telos). Structure and order arise from chance collisions that happen to "take hold." Once such an encounter "takes," it reproduces itself, but this reproduction follows, rather than precedes, the contingent event. This view allows novelty without appeal to randomness as pure chaos: randomness here is structured, it’s contingency that takes form. That’s how Althusser sidesteps the logical impossibility of deriving novelty from a closed dialectic: he opens the system ontologically to chance.
Althusser’s aleatory materialism prefigures the probabilistic worldview of modern science, particularly Boltzmann's statistical mechanics and quantum theory: Boltzmann grounded thermodynamics in randomness and probability, deriving entropy (the "arrow of time") from statistical distributions of particles. This replaced deterministic necessity with stochastic order (exactly what Althusser wanted in social theory). Quantum mechanics later radicalized this: randomness was no longer epistemic but ontological. The world's structure itself is probabilistic, not the result of a preordained logic. Althusser’s aleatory materialism naturalizes randomness as the true ground of material processes, not as a failure of knowledge, but as the generative condition of reality. So where Hegel's dialectic "conjures" new determinations through contradiction, Althusser’s stochastic materialism produces new structures through random encounters, later stabilized by reproduction (like atoms forming a molecule, or social relations forming a mode of production).
Althusser’s materialism of the encounter is a philosophical answer to the problem of ontological reduction and informational closure. It solves the problem of generating novelty without collapsing into Hegelian idealism or mechanical determinism by grounding all structure in real randomness (stochasticity) rather than in logical necessity.