This is a culmination of a lot of ideas I've had over the years that constitute my world view and understanding of our reality.
Some key realizations I've had are that there are many parallels between concepts of energy gradients driving evolution of dynamic systems, emergence, and self-organization with the core concepts of Dialectical Materialism rooted in contradictions, transformation of quantity into quality, and the negation of the negation.
Dialectical Materialism describes the cyclical process of development where an initial thesis is countered by an antithesis, leading to a synthesis that retains aspects of both but transcends them to a new level. This directly mirrors the idea of energy gradients driving systems towards higher levels of complexity and organization. In both cases, emergent properties arise from the interactions within the system driven by the selection pressures.
I see nature as having a fractal quality to it where environmental pressures to optimize space and energy use drive the emergence of similar patterns at different scales. I argue that our social structures are a direct extension of the physical reality and simply constitute a higher level of abstraction and organization that directly builds on the layers beneath.
If you're simply interested in a standalone introduction to dialectics can skip to chapter 8, which is largely self-contained. The preceding chapters build a foundation by illustrating how self-organization leads to the emergence of minds and social structures.
One of the goals I have here is to provide an introduction to diamat for people in STEM who may be coming from the liberal mainstream by demonstrating a clear connection between materialist understanding of physical reality and human societies.
Feedback and critique are both very welcome.
an audiobook here (it's LLM narrated so not perfect) https://theunconductedchorus.com/audio.html
I very much agree with all the 5 points you've made. My perspective on the dialectic process comes from the physics side of things. The way I look at this is that any dynamic system be it physical or social, has energy gradients or pressures within it. These pressures create instability within the system that drives its evolution. This is the lens I view contradictions through. So, within the rules of capitalist system we have contradictions that stem from private ownership of production, and these create social tensions that must resolve in some way. Then the system transitions to a new state that will have its own set of rules that guide its evolution and its own contradictions, and this cyclical process continues on indefinitely.
I think I understand your point of view, your are viewing contradictions as creators of pressures that lead to a instability in the system which must be solved in a way that is in tune with both sides of the contradiction.
But what dialectical method gives us is that those pressures are not necessarily created by the contradictions, they can and, even more when dealing with nature, normally are external, what lies within the contradictory process itself is the answer to those pressures, meaning that one side must triumph over the other for this contradiction to be "solved".
So basically you are looking for the cause of the "problem" within the system but the answer outside it, when with diamat the cause is always a combination of external and internal conditions, but the solution lies within the system itself.
There is an easy example of this in thermodynamics itself, which is as much as my knowledge on the matter will allow me, that is boiling water: The water has its on internal contradiction between its liquid and gaseous state, when we as a external force apply heat to liquid water we create a rapid change in it forcing it to become, after enough heat is used, gaseous.
So in this case the cause of the change was mostly external, but the result is to be expect within the internal contradiction, as Mao would say: "In a suitable temperature, an egg becomes a chicken, but in no circumstances can a rock become a chicken".
Also I should have done this earlier, but all the points I made in these comments come from F. Engels' "Socialism Utopian and Scientific" and "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy", and sometimes with the help of M. Cornforth's "Materialism and the Dialectical Method".
To clarify a bit, I don't see the pressures as being products of contradictions, but rather being synonymous with them. My view is that pressures are a result of energy gradients. Any system that has an energy gradient present within it will try to find its way to a ground state due to the laws of thermodynamics. My argument is that thermodynamics is ultimately the engine behind all physical processes, and our social dynamics is a level of abstraction that is an extension of the physical world.
I'm not sure there's much value separating external and internal conditions though as both ultimately feed into the system. Complex systems often have recursive properties to them where operation of the system itself changes the environment and that feeds back into the operation of the system.
And I should read up on Feuerbach and Cornforth a bit more. I'm familiar with them, but haven't really studied their work in detail. 😅
I wouldn't say that changing the contradictions from creators to synonymous with pressures improves the system a lot, I also have to say that there is always value in separating external and internal conditions as they become easier to study as such and greater understanding is always valuable.
And although I don't have the necessary knowledge in thermodynamics to expand on your argument around it, it does fell to me eerie similar to what the material mechanists did centuries ago when they tried to understand the world through the laws of mechanical physics.
You can get a better understanding of thermodynamics by using Dialectical Materialism to study it, but trying to understand diamat by trying to fit in it laws of any branch of physics can lead to grave mistakes.
And I do recommend those books, they go in with way more detail and knowledge about what we are discussing here.
The boundaries we create between internal and external are necessarily artificial constructs in our mind. They're useful for partitioning the world into categories we can manipulate in our heads, but it's important to keep in mind that the reality is a continuum.
The way I look at diamat is that it's a framework for understanding social evolution, but the world itself is ultimately a material thing and society itself is a product of material conditions. The whole book is basically me building the case for how I arrived at my current understanding of the world.
I'll definitely check the books out though.