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 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.