The gravity of the situation

[LBird]

Young Master Smeet wrote:

What does:

Quote:

Marx was right and Engels was wrong

Mean?  Right and wrong about what?

What you were asking about.

[Young Master Smeet]

What was I asking about?

[ALB]

You beat me to it, YMS.

Quote:

But I have provided the answer …. No matter how many times I repeat that 'inorganic nature' is an 'ingredient into activity', your ideology tells you to ask 'But, what is it, when it's not an 'ingredient into activity?'.

You are right. This "answer" does demand further explanation as it seems to be saying that "inorganic nature" is never not an "ingredient" to human activity and that the two always go together somehow.

[Bijou Drains]

LBird wrote:

You want to 'know' without a 'knower'.[/quote] I think what he is trying to say is that he doesn't know.

[Anonymous]

Tim Kilgallon wrote:

 I think what he is trying to say is that he doesn't know.

 Know what? 

[Bijou Drains]

Vin wrote:

Tim Kilgallon wrote:

 I think what he is trying to say is that he doesn't know.

 Know what? 

 I don't know

[Dave B]

'Knowing' requires an 'active knower'. As I think someone mentioned earlier L. Bird ‘appears’ to be following in the well trodden footsteps of old intellectual ‘giants’ like Bishop Berkeley.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Berkeley  The question is I think does the claimed ‘existing material world’ or the ‘truth’ actually continue along its merry little way independently of whether it is known about and understood, or not, or with or without 'active knowers'. Or is the ‘material world’, as we think, or used to historically think of it, just or mostly, a product of thought? The ancient Egyptians used to think that the sun was carried across the sky by one of their gods in an invisible chariot. It had to be invisible otherwise they would be able to see it. That was a good idea I think, and a hat tip to the material reality of things being pulled along, by in this case, ‘invisible horses’ etc. And Harry Potter etc. If it moved, something albeit invisible, moved it. We have now in modern theory our own ‘invisible horses’ except they just call it ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’. Dark being invisible as it is? ; we ‘know’ ‘Dark Matter’ and ‘Dark Energy’ exists because of its effects which operates in the same way as the invisible chariot.  Is the ‘real material world’ and the ‘truth’, that exists independently of thought, the horse dragging the thought cart, and chariot, behind it? And; “In reality we know nothing, for truth lies at the deep bottom of the well.”  https://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/ch03.htm I think this idea, as a bit of fluffed joke, appears elsewhere in a strange place! https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+4

[ALB]

I think I know what he is trying to say — that the world we know is as we know it but that it is a mental construct out of a world that is unknowable (if that makes sense). He expresses this in his own way by saying that humans transform this "inorganic world", which we cannot know, into the "organic world", which we do know but which while 'real' in the sense of existing outside the mind is still a mental construct that does not exist independently of human activity. Where he has got into difficulty is over his concept of an "inorganic world". He needs this to be able to claim not to be a simple classical philosophical idealist but is unable to say what it is, only that it is unknowable, and that it is even illegitimate to ask questions about it. It is some mysterious "ultimate reality" about which nothing can be said or known (though as the non-mental "ingredient" out of which his "organic world" is constructed it sounds suspiciously like his dreaded "matter").The obvious way out for him would be to abandon his concept of an "unorganic world" but that would make him  the classical idealist he denies he is. It's because he won't take this route that he ties himself in knots. On the other hand, if he did take that route he would then be arguing that to say 'x exists' or 'x is real' is merely to say that 'x is the outcome of human mental activity' so that it is self-contradictory to say that anything can 'exist' independently of human activity, and so to conclude that everything that exists is a mental or has a mental aspect. It's a point of view that has a prominent place in the history of philosophy but one rarely embraced by socialists.

[Anonymous]

A genius to the rescue of LBird “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”― Albert Einstein

[Bijou Drains]

Just a thought, if L Bird is of the opinion that if we don't observe it is doesn't exist. Does he have Life Assurance, because if he has, why? He won't be around to observe it paying out.

[ALB]

And there's Samuel Johnson's famous refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealist philosophy:http://www.samueljohnson.com/refutati.htmlBut this wasn't really a refutation as Berkeley argued that the mind in which stones existed was that of an unobservable super-mind called "God".  That's a more elegant solution than introducing some equally unobservable, mysterious "ingredient" about which nothing can be said or known (or asked).

[alanjjohnstone]

Hmmm…seems as if LBird has been placed into check…Could it well be check-mate…Game, set and match…Here at the Crucible, there are hushed voices as LBird, surveys the table for a shot that gets him out of the snooker and into safety while the opposition prowl around ready to pounce upon their prey…Can it be all over, or will LBird score in the last seconds of injury time?Oh, this is getting exciting…who said i was a boring old debate…it has everything…high tension…emotion…i'm on tenterhooks for the next post …No idea what it is all about but who cares…it is drama in the making…that i can tell. 

[ALB]

In which case, Alan, you'll enjoy this similar shoot-out on the ICC forum lasy year:http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/link/13470/what-lbirdismWhich includes one saying

Quote:

That's me done with you.

and the other replying:

Quote:

best wishes and don't let the door hit you on way OUT )

Needless to say, the exchange continues for another 50 posts. Instructive as well as amusing. And the insults are a bit more refined on the ICC forum despite them being violent revolutionaries.

[LBird]

ALB wrote:

And the insults are a bit more refined on the ICC forum despite them being violent revolutionaries.

One more bit of information worth considering about the ICC.They've never banned me for what I've been arguing.

[LBird]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

Hmmm…seems as if LBird has been placed into check…Could it well be check-mate…Game, set and match…Here at the Crucible, there are hushed voices as LBird, surveys the table for a shot that gets him out of the snooker and into safety while the opposition prowl around ready to pounce upon their prey…Can it be all over, or will LBird score in the last seconds of injury time?Oh, this is getting exciting…who said i was a boring old debate…it has everything…high tension…emotion…i'm on tenterhooks for the next post …No idea what it is all about but who cares…it is drama in the making…that i can tell. 

It's relatively easy to understand, alan.First comes the politics of production, which produces philosophy, which produces physics.In production, we have the 'theory and practice' of the bourgeoisie, who employ their concept of 'private property'. By its nature, this concept precludes any 'democratic interference' in itself. 'Private property' just 'is', and it is alleged by those with power to be eternal, and not subject to socio-historical analysis of its emergence, and thus not changable.This concept of 'private property' is thus then similarly reproduced within philosophy, where it is called 'matter'. By its nature, this concept precludes any 'democratic interference' in itself. 'Matter' just 'is', and it is alleged by those with power to be eternal, and not subject to socio-historical analysis of its emergence, and thus not changable.This concept of 'matter' is thus then similarly reproduced within physics, where it is employed in social practice, by those 'practical men' who have not the slightest interest or ability in philosophical issues, and so we have the sight of Einstein and Bohr (the quote was helpfully provided by DJP, earlier) playing with their 'mud pies and rocks', and unable to provide a way forward for a democratic physics (of course, based upon a democratic philosophy and democratic production).That task, which cannot be completed by bourgeois physicists, philosophers, or property owners, is awaiting the class conscious proletariat, when it revolutionises its world.As Charlie said, 'All that is solid melts into air' – including 'matter'.But this sort of revolutionary thinking plays no part in the worldview of the Engelsist-Kautsky-Lenin 'socialists'. They claim to 'know matter' as it is.Dickheads, the lot of them.I know that you're confused, alan, but, for christsake, don't listen to them.

[Author]

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