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.
I don't go too deep into the whole physics business, so hopefully the general ideas are still accessible.
Regarding people in stem often being highly opinionated, I find most people don't realize that their knowledge and problem solving skills are largely domain specific. They learn to solve problems in a particular context, and they immediately assume their skills are directly transferable to other contexts. People tend to forget that every domain has a lot of inherent complexity that takes years of training to master. The whole techbro culture is a perfect example of that. These people assume that complex social problems must have really simple technical solutions because they're used to solving technical problems. And in their view the only reason these problems haven't been solved is cause everyone else just dumb. So, it's largely a combination of ego and lack of broader perspective.
You're 100% correct, any engineer, scientist, etc tends to gravitate towards their own mythology as someone uniquely intelligent broadly, and not as someone who has highly trained in one specific department. The practice of cultivation and training makes other areas easier to grasp, but does not imbue any special knowledge without doing said training. That leads to incorrect solutions like tech nerds constantly trying to reinvent trains but with crypto or whatever other flavor of the month, instead of using good public transit.
Exactly, it's also the reason you see people often dismiss physical labor as unskilled jobs etc. They simply don't have the appreciation for the skills involved in that sort of work.