LBird
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SocialistPunk wrote:Like LBird sys they are ideologically in favour of the prevailing socio economic system, as the emphasis of the "science" is that we are hard wired to behave the way we behave.
It never ceases to surprise me that there are Communists who can see through 'the market' as an entirely human created system, with a historical development and social changes, rooted in classes and exploitation, and defended to the hilt with social ideology, but just can't see that all these factors also affect all human thinking, whether about wider 'science' or narrower 'cognitive biases and beliefs'.The belief that 'biases and beliefs' are rooted in nature is an ideological belief, not some version of 'objective science'.Unless we uncover the class nature of this myth, we might as well also accept the 'market as human nature' argument, too.
DJP wrote:Actually this topic is about cognitive biases and beliefs, it is not another thread about Critical Realism. If you want to discuss that again start another thread…[my bold]Well, I was trying to get you to discuss your 'cognitive biases and beliefs' about your devotional 'physicalism', but, of course, you won't do that, so you just smear me with wanting to divert into CR.You still don't seem to understand that you need to reveal your ideology. I do, and openly declare it to be Marxism and CR, which I regard as mostly synonymous, for Communists, if not for other CRs with other politics.So, any thread about 'cognitive biases and beliefs' has to start from both my ideological beliefs (Marx and CR) and yours (… empty space, something to hide?).What have you got to hide about your 'cognitive biases and beliefs', DJP?Why won't you tell us what you believe about 'cognitive biases and beliefs'?Why pretend that you're interested in any subject, but won't discuss your beliefs about that subject, and prefer to follow the ideological lead of bourgeois thinkers, and pretend that it's down to some universal flaw in human nature, as you alleged at the start?Why start a thread, and refuse to engage, just because you don't like 'difficult' questions about your unexamined ideology?Why is it always someone else's fault, and not yours?'Cognitive biases and beliefs'? You haven't got a clue, DJP, and you're never like to have one, because you refuse to discuss.And that's your choice, not some failing passed on from human nature, or a biological failing in your genes, as your ideological mentors allege.
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:Your 'belief' in 'physicalism' might provide a good test case, then, of how and why 'beliefs' are so difficult to change, which seems to be the underlying purpose of this thread.Possibly. Likewise your mistaken belief that Marx's method and Critical Realism are compatible.. But I think we're already doomed.
The difference is that I've continously tried to get a discussion going about Marx and CR, but first we have to identify both Marx and CR, which comrades seem reluctant to do, so we never get to make any comparison.I've given many examples of CR 'in action', and even shown how CR fits well with an explanation of Marx's concept of 'value', but I've just been met with religious devotion to 'materialism' (and Engels' version at that, not Marx's), rather than the adherents of 'materialism' giving similar examples of it 'in action', and going on to show how it explains 'value'.I've met this response on LibCom and the ICC site, too, so I'm quite prepared to think, with you, that the discussion is already doomed. It's always quotes from 'The Great Man', The Word (and that word is 'material'), rather than critical thinking. Tell me again, which of those two methods was Marx's?
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:You won't even accept that it just might be an ideological belief, and that someone might have an interest in deceiving you.I've never said that I do not accept the possibility of being wrong…. Again I don't think anyone has.
Your 'belief' in 'physicalism' might provide a good test case, then, of how and why 'beliefs' are so difficult to change, which seems to be the underlying purpose of this thread.
DJP wrote:No I'm not saying either of those things. It's only you that suggests that anyone does. Ad infinitum it would seem..Nothing to do with your 'method' of posting uncommented links, and no critical discussion, so that we have to guess what you 'are saying'.
DJP wrote:The questions I am thinking of are "what does it take to change a belief?" and "how do we know when we're deceiving ourselves?On 'physicalism'?As far as I can tell, nothing works.You won't even accept that it just might be an ideological belief, and that someone might have an interest in deceiving you.The first thing to ask is 'where do my beliefs come from'?I always expose my 'sources', my ideological mentors, but you (and others on this site) always seem to think that you're just 'stating the truth'. As objective individuals, of course, dealing with the real world…
Bhaskar's works are as difficult to read as Marx's, which is why we need to 'translate' them into terms understandable to most workers, and to sort the wheat from the chaff.There is much that is useful in both Marx and Bhaskar, but there is also lots that is either meaningless or simply wrong.I think this work is a task for Communists, who mostly seem to make no effort to encourage and help develop workers about issues that are vital for them to understand, if workers are to democratically control social production across the planet.
DJP wrote:Well there's my point proved in one postI must admit that I'm still missing your point, DJP.Or are you saying that academic 'psychology' can't be challenged on ideological grounds?Or that bringing 'ideology' into discussions is impermissable, because there is a 'Truth' out there, and 'ideologists' like me are just spoiling perfectly decent objective discussions between non-ideological individuals?If I were to be a bit more critical in tone, I would argue that it's your own refusal to engage in ideological debate that is preventing discussion, not some universal, natural problem with humans and their inability to discuss honestly or seek the (or 'a') truth of their society.
DJP wrote:In short:We're Not Programmed to Seek "Truth," We're Programmed to "Win"Our Brains Don't Understand ProbabilityWe Think Everyone's Out to Get UsWe're Hard Wired To Have a Double StandardFacts Don't Change Our MindSo what do you think?I think that this list is based on an ideology.
DJP wrote:Should be give up or just carry on knowing that our brains make us deluded egotists that like to form narratives with ourselves as the hero?The problem, DJP, is that you're following this line of thinking as if it's 'the objective, god's honest truth', rather than a non-Communist view of humans.For a start, it's a transhistorical statement, not one that locates 'us' in history and society, never mind that we live in class society, where a small minority, aided and abetted by their academic dupes, tell 'us' these things, all the time.Biological individuals who just want to 'win', isolated, paranoid, duplicitous and impervious to 'material conditions'…Who'd have an interest in 'us' all, not only believing that, but posting it on a Communist site?On a wider note, DJP, you seem to often give links to non-Communist sites and their thinking, without any apparent critical awareness that 'psychology' as a discipline is riven with ideological bias.Unless I'm missing some subtle point that you're making?
robbo203 wrote:L Bird,How would this quote support your thesis? Correct me if Im wrong but Engel's repudiation of a contrast between mind and matter sounds a bit like your idealism-materialism, no?This problem is, robbo, that Engels, because he was confused, can be quoted to both support and deny my 'thesis'. So, the issue can't be resolved by appeal to the authority of Engels.What's worse, although to a lesser extent, Marx's use of the term 'material' was also ill-advised, and at times he also uses words like 'reflection', which go hand-in-hand with the positivist view of the world and knowledge. So, I think, on balance, Marx can be used to support my thesis, but there is clearly passages of his that appear to support the 'materialists'. Thus, Marx's authority, too, is not completely conclusive.It's my opinion that only when workers come to understand the differences between 'idealism', 'materialism' and 'idealism-materialism' can they themselves provide the authority of their own thinking. It seems clear to me that once workers wrestle with epistemology, they will only have the choice of the latter, because that's the only 'thesis' that fits with Marx's works, and his beliefs about workers' self-emancipation.This is not a religion that quotes texts that cannot be questioned.It's about the self-development of the proletariat. We must be the final authority for any debate, not an elite, not scientists, not a central committee, not priests, not texts, not 'the material', but humans, consciously thinking about issues that affect us, and then voting upon them.FWIW, your quote from Engels, mentioning "its laws", progress, advances, etc. can be taken both ways, unfortunately. I recommend getting to understand the issues for yourself, rather than relying upon Engels.I think my analogy of "a clean sheet of paper upon which anything can be drawn" (idealism), "a page of numbered dot-to-dots which merely remain to be simply joined" (materialism), and "a page of un-numbered dots, which provide some guidance but must be actively numbered to build a meaningful picture (idealism-materialism, or theory and practice), is one way of trying to get to grips with the issues of the relationship between subject and object, the interaction between which produces knowledge.
ALB wrote:So that's what you've been trying to say all along !No, I have been saying all along. It's the 'materialists' who have a problem accepting that both the ideal and material have equal weight in epistemology. For some reason, they keep stressing 'materialism', a 'materialism' that tries to ignore 'idealism' as an evil competitor, which silly idea they got from Engels, who didn't seem to realise that both object and subject are required for an interaction to take place.Because of this ignorance of Marx's 'idealism-materialism', when the 'materialists' are asked which ideology they use to undertake this interaction between them (as a social subject) and the real world (an external object), they pretend that they haven't got an ideology, because they think they have a non-interactive, contemplative relationship to the the real world, and so that they know 'The Truth'. I know it's hard to believe, but if you ask the 'materialists' what ideology they employ to understand a rock, they revert to claiming to use individual biological sensations, and that they passively listen to the 'active' rock, which tells them that it 'really is' hard! Crazy, isn't it?
ALBs quote wrote:Sohn-Rethel seems to think that he can avoid this dilemma through recourse to “materialism.” This is not to say that Sohn-Rethel subscribes to a vulgar dialectical materialist orthodoxy. He asserts that the reality Marx opposes to forms of consciousness is not “matter” but social existence…Yeah, there's that damned word 'materialism', yet again!Seems he, too, felt he had to use a term that Marx should have made clearer: that is, by 'material', Marx meant 'social production', as I keep reiterating. Which, it seems, Sohn-Rethel was aware of (his use of 'social existence', not 'matter'), but didn't have the insight to make clear to workers, as we are doing here, that Marx was not a bloody 'materialist', in the sense of 'material'.
ALB wrote:His Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology looks like another book to add to your reading listYeah, I've already ordered it, earlier today. None of the other German works, quoted in the LibCom article, seem to be available in English.
Ortlieb wrote:All measuring is a reciprocal relation, measured by the mathematical-scientific method, between the inquiring subject and the nature that is the object of his inquiry; thus, one can never refer to “nature in itself” but only to this specific form of interaction.30 The subject-object relation produced by the experiment and expressed in the form of a law cannot be simply reduced to one of its two poles: not even that of the subject, as a strict culturalism might seem to suggest. The laws of nature are neither the products of a discourse that can be fabricated at will, disregarding the objective side, nor are they mere properties of nature that have nothing to do with the subjective bearers of knowledge.[my bold]This is all, to me, totally consistent with Marx's 'idealism-materialism', and nothing to do with 'materialism', which by its very name disregards 'one of the two poles', of human ideas and external reality.'Theory and practice' is as much 'ideal' as it is 'material', which Marx makes clear in his Theses on Feuerbach, and elsewhere.And this fits with Pannekoek's view that the laws of nature are knowledge produced by humans, not 'discoveries' of 'objective nature'.
I came across this very interesting text about science, objectivity, mathematics, Kant, Hume, Copernicus, Galileo, Popper, etc., on the LibCom site. I thought it worth sharing with other comrades, who are interested in these questions, which will affect how we view 'science' in a future Communist society. The author seems to link the commodity with the way we view nature. Anyway, it provides food for thought.http://libcom.org/library/unconscious-objectivity-aspects-critique-mathematical-natural-sciences-excerpts-claus-pe
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:Sounds like a rejection of science, and a return to empiricism!Sounds like a storm in a teacup to me!
What, Capitalism?My chosen scientific ideology tells me otherwise!
DJP wrote:LBird wrote:World revolution? Isn't that what your 'focus' is upon?Sometimes.About five minutes ago my focus was on "how to make a cup of tea". Das Kapital was of no use to me then…
Sounds like a rejection of science, and a return to empiricism!Problem is, if we as workers use empiricism to inform our view of the world, we'll end up making cups of tea for the rich, forever.
