Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
My dialectic is internal contradictions move all things. Nature is dialectical, that doesn’t contradict determinism. Men may make their own history, but did they have the free will whether to do so?
the above quote is very clearly anti-determinist: we may act within a web of social-economic conditions, and may have our actions altered by said conditions, but we still actively choose within those conditions
How does it disprove determinism? Where do choices come from beyond a vast array of material factors? You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you” you have to show I’m wrong.
You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you”
that aside, for this conversation to make sense you need to say which conception of “free will” you think is illusory. Sometimes people mean something like a spirit or soul expressing itself through your brain. Sure, that’s not real, Engels’ arguments against agnosticism apply. Some ideas are better. I personally don’t think that determinism is a useful tool to predict individual behavior since we can’t go back in time to prove it.
My understanding of how thoughts work is a bunch of contradictions working themselves out and considering outside factors spontaneously. Why does free will fit in. Just because it’s complex it doesn’t make it free. Choices are not freely chosen, but chosen through the workings of the mind.
ok so where is the line between what’s been pre-determined and what hasn’t been? Or is everything that is to happen already guaranteed to happen, down to the smallest possible action?
I don’t think there’s any interpretation of quantum physics that allows for it to be clockwork, but I think it’s a big leap from non-deterministic quantum phenomena to anything that could meaningfully be called free will.
Take a great hitter in baseball and try to determine what makes them so great at deciding when to swing. We try to see, right up until the moment when the batter commits to a swing, whether we can predict their actions in advance.
Some pitches, anyone could tell you not to swing at. Some, anyone could tell you to swing at. So the greatness lies in-between. Say for the sake of argument that it’s 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd.
Then we have other great hitters, coaches, physiologists, etc. analyze the pitches instead, more confidently classifying them as swing or don’t, narrowing the band where the great hitter had a difficult choice to make, bringing us to 40%/40%/20%.
Then we outfit the player with all sorts of monitoring devices and watch the pitches in super slo-mo, revealing that on what had been previously considered too close to call, by the time it became apparent that the pitch was going to break, the batter’s muscles were tensed up in such a way that trying to adjust would have resulted in a ground-out to first. 45%/45%/10%
We install a theoretical non- brain implant to pick apart that mythical 10% and reduce it to 1%; the other 99% of the time, the batter is effectively acting as a complex machine.
At some point, though, we reach a pitch that really could have gone either way no matter how good our measurements were; a pitch that came down to a quantum roll of the dice. Is this the decision? Made by what? Subatomic particles that the batter had for lunch a while back? Does food get a welcoming party in the gut, where it’s informed that it’s now part of a baseball player and to be sure to take the fork in the wavefunction collapse that leads to more homeruns?
So yeah, when you look at it too closely, the idea that there’s an “I” who deserves credit for all “I”'ve done kinda falls apart and can’t be salvaged at the quantum level, either. Still, it’s a powerful illusion that we all basically buy into all of the time that we’re not thinking about it or taking hallucinogens, so I’m going back to it now.
Nothing is pre-determined per se. Everything is a product of the myriad factors and interactions of matter in the universe. The world is absurd I don’t believe in a plan or fate. My point is that free will does not exist in any form except as a perception of the spontaneous workings of our brains. I don’t think too hard about how everything that happens is inevitable, but that is the logical conclusion. I don’t think too hard about it because the world’s too complicated to predict with precision and that’s the beauty of it. Scientific socialism is the most accurate worldview for understanding how the world works closest to the truth.
I don’t think too hard about how everything that happens is inevitable, but that is the logical conclusion
These seem to be saying the exact opposite of each other - if everything is inevitable, it is therefore pre-determined.
As for the relation between the physical (chemical, biological, etc) processes of the brain and consciousness, you’re absolutely right that the latter necessarily arises from the former, but that does not mean that our consciousness is reducible to just those processes. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and, even if we were able to trace all the physical processes of the brain, we would still not be able to entirely explain our subjective experience.
For scientific socialism, I think relying too much on a deterministic outlook creates a very sterile, complacent ideology. Look at the pre-WWII communist parties of Europe, who were positivistic determinists par excellence. They believed wholeheartedly in the inevitability of a socialist revolution, and look where that got them. I think a more productive view would be to embrace the inherent unpredictability of human action, our capacity to break out of a given historical moment. Nothing is guaranteed or pre-determined (however probable), and it is precisely because of that fact that our actions are meaningful, that praxis is a worthwhile endeavor.
I hope this doesn’t come off as too critical, I appreciate you sharing your views comrade
The conception of “free will” I mean is any that assumes if time was rewinded a different choice had the possibility of being made. @EelBolshevikism@hexbear.net
That sounds highly unlikely, but maybe possible? It doesn’t validate free will, but it’s hard to come up with a good definition. The problem is secular “free will” believers will object to it being like a soul, which is the easiest way to describe it.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
too materialist where’s your dialect
My dialectic is internal contradictions move all things. Nature is dialectical, that doesn’t contradict determinism. Men may make their own history, but did they have the free will whether to do so?
the above quote is very clearly anti-determinist: we may act within a web of social-economic conditions, and may have our actions altered by said conditions, but we still actively choose within those conditions
How does it disprove determinism? Where do choices come from beyond a vast array of material factors? You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you” you have to show I’m wrong.
that aside, for this conversation to make sense you need to say which conception of “free will” you think is illusory. Sometimes people mean something like a spirit or soul expressing itself through your brain. Sure, that’s not real, Engels’ arguments against agnosticism apply. Some ideas are better. I personally don’t think that determinism is a useful tool to predict individual behavior since we can’t go back in time to prove it.
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https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
My favourite part of Oppose Book Worship is how people treat it with book worship too.
Not saying you are. It’s just funny and came to mind.
It is funny, though unfortunately pretty inline with Mao’s cultural reception, where the Little Red Book was basically a pocket bible.
My understanding of how thoughts work is a bunch of contradictions working themselves out and considering outside factors spontaneously. Why does free will fit in. Just because it’s complex it doesn’t make it free. Choices are not freely chosen, but chosen through the workings of the mind.
ok so where is the line between what’s been pre-determined and what hasn’t been? Or is everything that is to happen already guaranteed to happen, down to the smallest possible action?
I don’t think there’s any interpretation of quantum physics that allows for it to be clockwork, but I think it’s a big leap from non-deterministic quantum phenomena to anything that could meaningfully be called free will.
Take a great hitter in baseball and try to determine what makes them so great at deciding when to swing. We try to see, right up until the moment when the batter commits to a swing, whether we can predict their actions in advance.
Some pitches, anyone could tell you not to swing at. Some, anyone could tell you to swing at. So the greatness lies in-between. Say for the sake of argument that it’s 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd.
Then we have other great hitters, coaches, physiologists, etc. analyze the pitches instead, more confidently classifying them as swing or don’t, narrowing the band where the great hitter had a difficult choice to make, bringing us to 40%/40%/20%.
Then we outfit the player with all sorts of monitoring devices and watch the pitches in super slo-mo, revealing that on what had been previously considered too close to call, by the time it became apparent that the pitch was going to break, the batter’s muscles were tensed up in such a way that trying to adjust would have resulted in a ground-out to first. 45%/45%/10%
We install a theoretical non-
brain implant to pick apart that mythical 10% and reduce it to 1%; the other 99% of the time, the batter is effectively acting as a complex machine.
At some point, though, we reach a pitch that really could have gone either way no matter how good our measurements were; a pitch that came down to a quantum roll of the dice. Is this the decision? Made by what? Subatomic particles that the batter had for lunch a while back? Does food get a welcoming party in the gut, where it’s informed that it’s now part of a baseball player and to be sure to take the fork in the wavefunction collapse that leads to more homeruns?
So yeah, when you look at it too closely, the idea that there’s an “I” who deserves credit for all “I”'ve done kinda falls apart and can’t be salvaged at the quantum level, either. Still, it’s a powerful illusion that we all basically buy into all of the time that we’re not thinking about it or taking hallucinogens, so I’m going back to it now.
Nothing is pre-determined per se. Everything is a product of the myriad factors and interactions of matter in the universe. The world is absurd I don’t believe in a plan or fate. My point is that free will does not exist in any form except as a perception of the spontaneous workings of our brains. I don’t think too hard about how everything that happens is inevitable, but that is the logical conclusion. I don’t think too hard about it because the world’s too complicated to predict with precision and that’s the beauty of it. Scientific socialism is the most accurate worldview for understanding how the world works closest to the truth.
These seem to be saying the exact opposite of each other - if everything is inevitable, it is therefore pre-determined.
As for the relation between the physical (chemical, biological, etc) processes of the brain and consciousness, you’re absolutely right that the latter necessarily arises from the former, but that does not mean that our consciousness is reducible to just those processes. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and, even if we were able to trace all the physical processes of the brain, we would still not be able to entirely explain our subjective experience.
For scientific socialism, I think relying too much on a deterministic outlook creates a very sterile, complacent ideology. Look at the pre-WWII communist parties of Europe, who were positivistic determinists par excellence. They believed wholeheartedly in the inevitability of a socialist revolution, and look where that got them. I think a more productive view would be to embrace the inherent unpredictability of human action, our capacity to break out of a given historical moment. Nothing is guaranteed or pre-determined (however probable), and it is precisely because of that fact that our actions are meaningful, that praxis is a worthwhile endeavor.
I hope this doesn’t come off as too critical, I appreciate you sharing your views comrade
The conception of “free will” I mean is any that assumes if time was rewinded a different choice had the possibility of being made. @EelBolshevikism@hexbear.net
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That sounds highly unlikely, but maybe possible? It doesn’t validate free will, but it’s hard to come up with a good definition. The problem is secular “free will” believers will object to it being like a soul, which is the easiest way to describe it.
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