What is Reddit's opinion of The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe?

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>on Marx’s own writings, i will raise the same point as your other critics that you’re playing far too fast and loose with the term “mode of production”, and it works to far too ambiguous an end; there has not been a complete upheaval in the capitalist mode of production even in the west and commodity production is still evidently supreme

I think these transformations are far more gradual than the strict Marxist dualism can recognize. But all the same I take your point. I would refer to Trotsky’s idea of asymmetric development, refer to sections of the global south which are still profoundly feudalistic, and claim the presence of Central African warlords doesn’t mean a new mode of post-feudalistic production hasn’t already emerged. My point being that a total upheaval of capitalist modality is not necessary for post capitalist modality to emerge.

>- Wark would disagree with me here but her qualification of her supposed “vectoralist” mode of production is a shoddy excess of content/form jargon. until commodity production is sublated it cannot accurately be said that a new mode of production has taken root.

I’m not familiar enough with Wark’s work to respond directly. But I disagree with your conclusion here. Why is production modality an all or nothing paradigm? My reading of Marx is that he expected communsim— through socialism— to spread some what gradually, or organically at least. I would claim we’re in the midst of the revolution between the nationalist bourgeoisie, and a new international technocratic upperclass— who’ve been empowered by the introduction of new mode of production. Although, given that I claim all material is fundamentally information, and also that class relations are much more reciprocal than his naive binaries are capable of recognizing — a more accurate term for me may be mode of communication.

>aside from that, i feel you’re being ahistorical by saying “Germany and Italy… sourced the most reactionary movements of the era” without at least acknowledging their intense revolutionary attitudes preceding (especially in the case of Germany) and following (especially in the case of Italy) said movements.

I don’t see how the presence of failed revolutionary movements make the claim of reactionary success ahistorical. I think the evidence is fairly clear that it was precisely the presence of petit-bourgeoisie nationalist backlash to those revolutionary movements that prevented their success; which conclusion Marx’s calculations specifically rejected, and which I think Turchin’s cliodynamic models point out is rather clearly in hindsight. My sense is that those revolutionary movements failed for reasons of historical necessity, and that Marx recognized the relevant forces in play, but fundamentally miscalculated them. Given that I think his math was good, I can come to no other conclusion then that the foundations of his theory were themselves naively constructed. Is this not sound logic?

>irrespective of that, attributing the pitfalls of Marx’s materialism to “quantum mechanics or relativity” is… novel? i have no idea how you could possibly hope to assert the “primacy of information to matter” but it would be interesting to see, i suppose? would that even still be materialism to any meaningful extent?

A lot of this is just me riffing on Zizek. I’m definitely coming up with my own ideas, but I doubt I’m really that novel. I don’t even work in the field, this is just a hobby for me.

But anyway, to defend the point— Everyone I’ve ever met who works in theoretical physics freely admits that matter can’t really exist in any kind of intuitive way. If you press them they’ll usually claim that they’re actually a physicalist— believing that physics is capable of describing what things are made of— but that it’s certainly not mater in any sense that we experience it. Alexander has suggested matter is composed of something much more like music than typical objects. Capra suggested it was something more like Taoism’s concept of ‘flow’, then anything solid. Others have suggested that, because of the hard problem of consciousness and because of various observer paradoxes evident in qm data, that we should employ a new kind of animism in our metaphysics. Others have suggested it is bets understood as a self-reflexive language— one capable of reading itself.

On the primacy or information— Relativity demonstrates pretty clearly that matter is best understood as discrete condensations of energy. QM seems to demonstrate that energy is best understood as discrete organizations of information. There’s a whole field— Information Theory— that seeks to integrate theoretical physics with computer science and evolutionary theory.

I’m really attracted to materialistic theories in the social sciences (I’ll include Freud here), because I think they succeed in rejecting the superstition of early modern dualism. So that’s why the push for materialism seems like a legacy worth saving to me. At the same time both are clearly from a pre-information age, and their it shows in their metaphysics