Are not the choices we make highly materially and socially determined? Where does free will come from? My position is scientific determinism coupled with ontological uncertainty. Things are complicated and contradictory as hell, and just because we study the world doesn’t mean we can predict the future.
I’m not saying we have free will, or that our choices aren’t materially and socially determined, I’m saying that we still do make those choices, and I’m cautioning against mechanical materialism that turns into pessimistic or nihilistic fatalism. We are parts of the whole, and we are conscious of it. We are active parts of the historical process and our history happens through our actions. Do you dispute Marx’s framing I quoted above?
I agree, I just don’t think that disproves determinism in any way. In my view communism is probably inevitable, but who knows? So I keep fighting. It’s easy to argue that capitalism must come to an end. I referenced socialism or extinction in my previous post.
The point isn’t to disprove determinism, and definitely isn’t to do so in favor of free will. The point is to achieve a dialectical materialist understanding as opposed to a mechanical one.
In your previous thread you say this about “sentience”:
yeah, but what is it? how does it have free will? isn’t it just regular matter subject to conditions, not able to make decisions.
Firstly, I think there’s some confusion about free will and will. Free will is an idealist notion that essentially our minds can operate above or outside of the laws of physics. That is clearly false. Just will, on the other hand, doesn’t have idealist connotations. I think that’s an error your interlocutor made in that thread, or a general error of not defining the terms discussed. An error I think you’ve made here and in general is opposing the two positions of mechanical determinism and free will in a dichotomy as the only possibilities.
I’m partial to @[email protected]’s thought about there being a category error. I think your mistake is in thinking that everything is infinitely reducible into smaller parts, and also without loss of context. In more general terms, I don’t think you’ve fully grasped dialectics.
We know from dialectics that relational properties are very important, and abstracting things doesn’t let us analyze them properly. I think you’re missing a key concept of dialectics when you assume that the parts that make up the whole are ontologically primary and exist separately from the whole while still being the same parts that make it up. I mean this in the sense that different bits of matter make up us, so from their properties you assume it’s clear that no will exists because atoms aren’t sentient. Your mistake is in not recognizing that our sentience is a property of matter. Not of abstract matter in general, but of the specific organization of matter which results in us. You say “regular matter” as if some other kind of matter would need to exist for sentience to exist.
A simpler example can be made from the properties of water. A single molecule of water doesn’t have surface tension. Following your mechanical model, we cannot really explain how water, when organized in a larger body, does. This is in general a fault of the Cartesian reductionist model which predominates in science today instead of dialectics. The concept which is usually used here is that of emergent properties, but it doesn’t really explain anything by itself. Dialectics on the other hand doesn’t even see a problem here to explain because a water molecule on its own and a water molecule in a larger body of water are two different things. The parts of the whole don’t exist separately from that whole as its parts.
The properties of the whole and the individual parts of that whole don’t exist separately from their interactions as parts of that whole. These properties only come into existence from the interactions of the parts and the whole. By simply studying individual water molecules, you would never discover surface tension. Parts interact with each other and with the whole, and the whole interacts with all the parts. A common example of this in Marxism are the base-superstructure relations. None of the components of either the base or the superstructure exist on their own, they are parts of the whole that is our society. The economic base tends to have a stronger influence on the superstructure, but the specific relations are constantly changing.
This is the dialectical account of history given by Marx, and it differs entirely from Cohen’s mechanical interpretation. The differences are clearly spelled out by Engels in the well known series of letters that he wrote towards the end of his life. In them he insists that the economic system and the superstructure are not simply the immediate and direct products of the prevailing form of production. Although their character is certainly conditioned predominantly by the development of the productive forces, it cannot be reduced to this factor alone. On the contrary, the economic system, for example, acquires its own distinctive character and its own inner dynamic. Through the division of labour, trade and commerce become areas of activity increasingly independent of production. They acquire, in short, a degree of “relative autonomy”.
Where there is division of labour on a social scale, there the different labour processes become independent of each other. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. But as soon as trade in products becomes independent of production proper, it follows a movement of its own, which, while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular respects and within this general dependence follows laws of its own: this movement has phases of its own and in turn reacts on the movement of production.
The same is true, even more clearly, of political and legal institutions and of art, religion and philosophy. None is purely “functional” to the development of production. Each of these spheres, while in general being determined by the development of production and by economic forces, has its own relatively autonomous process of development, its own relative independence. Each affects the others and the material base.
Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all of these react upon one another and also upon the economic basis. It is not that the economic condition is the cause and alone active, while everything else is only a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.
Another way to put this is through the constancy of change in dialectics and the build up of quantitative change into qualitative leaps. You cannot simply “go down a level” of quality and look at the quantitative aspects of the lower level to understand everything in the higher. The surface tension example can again be used here.
Taking from all the points above, we are active parts of the whole, our societies, our history, and we have constant and mutual interactions with each other, with the other parts, and with the whole. Our wills and choices (still far from free) do matter here very much and we do make the choices. Our consciousness is a key part of the process of our history, as is also seen in the notion that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Therefore, to deny our conscious will (not free will, which is idealist) and its effects is a mistake, and akin to saying that water doesn’t have the property of surface tension because an individual water molecule doesn’t, or arguing that social constructs aren’t real.
This doesn’t “disprove determinism” in general, and it doesn’t seek to. It’s just a proper contextualization of phenomena and processes. It does highlight the limitations and mistakes of mechanical determinism. Out of the specific interactions of the organizations of matter that make up us, come the properties of consciousness, thought, will, etc. Our will is simply a property of matter organized in a specific manner. There is no need to assume any metaphysics or idealism to describe our wills.
Another quote form Sayers to hopefully round this out:
Even in the realm of purely inorganic, physical phenomena, the mechanical view is an abstract and metaphysical one. It portrays physical objects in an idealised fashion, as unaffected by their relations.
[…]
Of course, the mechanical outlook has played an extremely important role in the development of the scientific understanding of nature, and it is not my intention to reject such methods and assumptions altogether. The error comes when such methods and assumptions are made into a universal philosophy and emphasised in an exclusive and one-sided fashion. Their abstract character is forgotten and they are employed as though they alone formed an adequate basis for understanding reality. The result is an abstract and metaphysical view of the world.
I totally agree. I did not mean to come across as a mechanical idealist. I didn’t think I needed to give a complex explanation of dialectics to make clear I wasn’t a mechanical idealist. Yes, wills and consciousness exist, my point is that they are illusory in so far as “we” think we have “control.” There is no “self” beyond the material world as the dominant mode of thought assumes.
Maybe it’s just a matter of language and not an actual philosophical difference, but I think there is still a philosophical difference.
There is no “self” beyond the material world as the dominant mode of thought assumes.
I agree, but I still think you’re making the mistake I’m trying to caution against in the sentence prior:
Yes, wills and consciousness exist, my point is that they are illusory in so far as “we” think we have “control.”
They are not illusory, they are material. And while the dominant mode of thought might assume we have more control than we actually do, it doesn’t mean we don’t have any control. We or our “self”, that is entirely part of the material world, does have a certain amount of control because it is a part of that same material world. This control isn’t separated from the material world, but a part of it. Your sentence here still sounds like only the material world has “control” and it exerts it upon us from outside, which would imply that we are different from the rest of matter, but in the opposite direction of the idealist free will notion.
I think that in your correct impulse to combat the idealist narratives prevalent today, you go too far in the opposite direction. Similar to how Plekhanov describes here:
No amount of patching was of any use, and one after another thinking people began to reject subjectivism as an obviously and utterly unsound doctrine. As always happens in such cases, however, the reaction against this doctrine caused some of its opponents to go to the opposite extreme. While some subjectivists, striving to ascribe the widest possible role to the “individual” in history, refused to recognise the historical progress of mankind as a process expressing laws, some of their later opponents, striving to bring out more sharply the coherent character of this progress, were evidently prepared to forget that men make history, and therefore, the activities of individuals cannot help being important in history. They have declared the individual to be a quantité négligeable. In theory, this extreme is as impermissible as the one reached by the more ardent subjectivists. It is as unsound to sacrifice the thesis to the antithesis as to forget the antithesis for the sake of the thesis. The correct point of view will be found only when we succeed in uniting the points of truth contained in them into a synthesis.
E: Also, apologies for neutral pronouns, but Voyager does not show pronouns.
They are not illusory, they are material. And while the dominant mode of thought might assume we have more control than we actually do, it doesn’t mean we don’t have any control.
I imagine they mean illusory as a matter of experience. In that we feel like we have free will, when we do not.
We or our “self”, that is entirely part of the material world, does have a certain amount of control because it is a part of that same material world. This control isn’t separated from the material world, but a part of it.
It is specifically because we are not separate from the material that we do not have control. Control implies volition/intent, which matter does not possess. It is precisely ascribing control to us that would set us apart from it.
To say that an individual could have acted differently given identical circumstances (i.e. rewinding to the time of decision) is, frankly, absurd. And this is the sense in which the other person is using the word “control”.
The only thing that Plekhanovs paragrah seems to convey (at least how I read it) is that individual actions have consequence. And while an individual has control in this sense, I do not see how it implies an individual has control in the sense that the other commenter is using the word.
It is specifically because we are not separate from the material that we do not have control. Control implies volition/intent, which matter does not possess. It is precisely ascribing control to us that would set us apart from it.
I’m not ascribing any metaphysical aspects here. We have “control” because we are active parts of the universe and we do exert influence on it. These relationships aren’t just one-sided. This one-sided view is wrong in either direction (free will or mechanical materialism). These are dialectical part-whole interactions. That’s the point I’m trying to make and that’s also Plekhanov’s point in that quote. The introduction of this largely undefined “control” in the last reply just confused things further. I take “control” to mean our influence on the world, not some metaphysical free will which no one here has argued in favor of. To repeat, I agree with QueerCommie that the dominant mode of though assumes a metaphysical free will aspect to this which is not correct.
And again, there is no need to have metaphysics to describe our consciousness. We do have intent and we are matter. These are properties of matter organized in a specific manner. Look at the surface tension analogy I used above. I don’t see why you assume that intent and things like it have to be some metaphysical qualities. Intent doesn’t have to mean something above material reality and it certainly doesn’t have to give us any power to act above or against material reality as free will would.
To say that an individual could have acted differently given identical circumstances (i.e. rewinding to the time of decision) is, frankly, absurd.
Yes, and no one here is claiming anything of the sort. The point, again, is that both the circumstances and us are parts of the universe. We aren’t in a uniquely passive role here. To quote Marx again:
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.
I suppose I might simply be a mechanical materialist. Much the same way as OP, I approach this topic in a more Buddhist way. To me things like intent seem like post-hoc rationalisation to delude ourselves (self in this case itself being a construct) into feeling in control (in the sense of the word as I mean it).
When it comes to control we are just in a semantic disagreement, i feel. I would simply replace the word with "intent in your replies and be mostly in agreement with what you’ve written.
I do reject the notion of dialectical materialist, although I must admit I am not very familiar with it. To me it seems like some form of compatibilism, but I should read more into it. I do not think thought has influence on the material.
Personally I find the predictive processing theory to best fall in line with my own experiences. And so to me, when we act on something like intent for future actions, I would rather say that intent is as an inner predictive model of a future state, whether or not it comes to be is out of our control, things will happen the way they happen.
It is all just atoms chugging along without emotion or thought behind it, intent is just a story we tell ourselves. You do not need intent to explain our actions, in fact it seems less complicated to do so.
I think it’s still a language thing. We are the universe and the hegemonic view seems to be that we are outside acting in it. By “illusory” I do not mean that the phenomenon is not real, but that the (socially constructed) perception of it is not true to reality. I mean it from the Buddhist perspective that if you meditate on it enough there is not individual thing you can call what is socially conceived to be a self.
how does determinism explain development? i feel like it should be viewed, as many things, as a spectrum and not something binary. For me development is the anti-thesis to determinism.
edit: while most things are already determined by our existing material conditions, i think we definitely have a bit of leeway, otherwise we wouldn’t be at this stage of development.
Contradictions are not precluded from determinism. All things are composed of unities of opposites constantly in change. Just because a mechanical materialist may not expect what did happen doesn’t invalidate determinism. The world is absurd, but that doesn’t bring wills into the question.
Are not the choices we make highly materially and socially determined? Where does free will come from? My position is scientific determinism coupled with ontological uncertainty. Things are complicated and contradictory as hell, and just because we study the world doesn’t mean we can predict the future.
I’m not saying we have free will, or that our choices aren’t materially and socially determined, I’m saying that we still do make those choices, and I’m cautioning against mechanical materialism that turns into pessimistic or nihilistic fatalism. We are parts of the whole, and we are conscious of it. We are active parts of the historical process and our history happens through our actions. Do you dispute Marx’s framing I quoted above?
I agree, I just don’t think that disproves determinism in any way. In my view communism is probably inevitable, but who knows? So I keep fighting. It’s easy to argue that capitalism must come to an end. I referenced socialism or extinction in my previous post.
The point isn’t to disprove determinism, and definitely isn’t to do so in favor of free will. The point is to achieve a dialectical materialist understanding as opposed to a mechanical one.
In your previous thread you say this about “sentience”:
Firstly, I think there’s some confusion about free will and will. Free will is an idealist notion that essentially our minds can operate above or outside of the laws of physics. That is clearly false. Just will, on the other hand, doesn’t have idealist connotations. I think that’s an error your interlocutor made in that thread, or a general error of not defining the terms discussed. An error I think you’ve made here and in general is opposing the two positions of mechanical determinism and free will in a dichotomy as the only possibilities.
I’m partial to @[email protected]’s thought about there being a category error. I think your mistake is in thinking that everything is infinitely reducible into smaller parts, and also without loss of context. In more general terms, I don’t think you’ve fully grasped dialectics.
We know from dialectics that relational properties are very important, and abstracting things doesn’t let us analyze them properly. I think you’re missing a key concept of dialectics when you assume that the parts that make up the whole are ontologically primary and exist separately from the whole while still being the same parts that make it up. I mean this in the sense that different bits of matter make up us, so from their properties you assume it’s clear that no will exists because atoms aren’t sentient. Your mistake is in not recognizing that our sentience is a property of matter. Not of abstract matter in general, but of the specific organization of matter which results in us. You say “regular matter” as if some other kind of matter would need to exist for sentience to exist.
A simpler example can be made from the properties of water. A single molecule of water doesn’t have surface tension. Following your mechanical model, we cannot really explain how water, when organized in a larger body, does. This is in general a fault of the Cartesian reductionist model which predominates in science today instead of dialectics. The concept which is usually used here is that of emergent properties, but it doesn’t really explain anything by itself. Dialectics on the other hand doesn’t even see a problem here to explain because a water molecule on its own and a water molecule in a larger body of water are two different things. The parts of the whole don’t exist separately from that whole as its parts.
The properties of the whole and the individual parts of that whole don’t exist separately from their interactions as parts of that whole. These properties only come into existence from the interactions of the parts and the whole. By simply studying individual water molecules, you would never discover surface tension. Parts interact with each other and with the whole, and the whole interacts with all the parts. A common example of this in Marxism are the base-superstructure relations. None of the components of either the base or the superstructure exist on their own, they are parts of the whole that is our society. The economic base tends to have a stronger influence on the superstructure, but the specific relations are constantly changing.
Here’s a quote from Sayers’ critique of mechanical materialism:
Another way to put this is through the constancy of change in dialectics and the build up of quantitative change into qualitative leaps. You cannot simply “go down a level” of quality and look at the quantitative aspects of the lower level to understand everything in the higher. The surface tension example can again be used here.
Taking from all the points above, we are active parts of the whole, our societies, our history, and we have constant and mutual interactions with each other, with the other parts, and with the whole. Our wills and choices (still far from free) do matter here very much and we do make the choices. Our consciousness is a key part of the process of our history, as is also seen in the notion that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Therefore, to deny our conscious will (not free will, which is idealist) and its effects is a mistake, and akin to saying that water doesn’t have the property of surface tension because an individual water molecule doesn’t, or arguing that social constructs aren’t real.
This doesn’t “disprove determinism” in general, and it doesn’t seek to. It’s just a proper contextualization of phenomena and processes. It does highlight the limitations and mistakes of mechanical determinism. Out of the specific interactions of the organizations of matter that make up us, come the properties of consciousness, thought, will, etc. Our will is simply a property of matter organized in a specific manner. There is no need to assume any metaphysics or idealism to describe our wills.
Another quote form Sayers to hopefully round this out:
I totally agree. I did not mean to come across as a mechanical idealist. I didn’t think I needed to give a complex explanation of dialectics to make clear I wasn’t a mechanical idealist. Yes, wills and consciousness exist, my point is that they are illusory in so far as “we” think we have “control.” There is no “self” beyond the material world as the dominant mode of thought assumes.
Maybe it’s just a matter of language and not an actual philosophical difference, but I think there is still a philosophical difference.
I agree, but I still think you’re making the mistake I’m trying to caution against in the sentence prior:
They are not illusory, they are material. And while the dominant mode of thought might assume we have more control than we actually do, it doesn’t mean we don’t have any control. We or our “self”, that is entirely part of the material world, does have a certain amount of control because it is a part of that same material world. This control isn’t separated from the material world, but a part of it. Your sentence here still sounds like only the material world has “control” and it exerts it upon us from outside, which would imply that we are different from the rest of matter, but in the opposite direction of the idealist free will notion.
I think that in your correct impulse to combat the idealist narratives prevalent today, you go too far in the opposite direction. Similar to how Plekhanov describes here:
E: Also, apologies for neutral pronouns, but Voyager does not show pronouns.
I imagine they mean illusory as a matter of experience. In that we feel like we have free will, when we do not.
It is specifically because we are not separate from the material that we do not have control. Control implies volition/intent, which matter does not possess. It is precisely ascribing control to us that would set us apart from it.
To say that an individual could have acted differently given identical circumstances (i.e. rewinding to the time of decision) is, frankly, absurd. And this is the sense in which the other person is using the word “control”.
The only thing that Plekhanovs paragrah seems to convey (at least how I read it) is that individual actions have consequence. And while an individual has control in this sense, I do not see how it implies an individual has control in the sense that the other commenter is using the word.
I’m not ascribing any metaphysical aspects here. We have “control” because we are active parts of the universe and we do exert influence on it. These relationships aren’t just one-sided. This one-sided view is wrong in either direction (free will or mechanical materialism). These are dialectical part-whole interactions. That’s the point I’m trying to make and that’s also Plekhanov’s point in that quote. The introduction of this largely undefined “control” in the last reply just confused things further. I take “control” to mean our influence on the world, not some metaphysical free will which no one here has argued in favor of. To repeat, I agree with QueerCommie that the dominant mode of though assumes a metaphysical free will aspect to this which is not correct.
And again, there is no need to have metaphysics to describe our consciousness. We do have intent and we are matter. These are properties of matter organized in a specific manner. Look at the surface tension analogy I used above. I don’t see why you assume that intent and things like it have to be some metaphysical qualities. Intent doesn’t have to mean something above material reality and it certainly doesn’t have to give us any power to act above or against material reality as free will would.
Yes, and no one here is claiming anything of the sort. The point, again, is that both the circumstances and us are parts of the universe. We aren’t in a uniquely passive role here. To quote Marx again:
I suppose I might simply be a mechanical materialist. Much the same way as OP, I approach this topic in a more Buddhist way. To me things like intent seem like post-hoc rationalisation to delude ourselves (self in this case itself being a construct) into feeling in control (in the sense of the word as I mean it).
When it comes to control we are just in a semantic disagreement, i feel. I would simply replace the word with "intent in your replies and be mostly in agreement with what you’ve written.
I do reject the notion of dialectical materialist, although I must admit I am not very familiar with it. To me it seems like some form of compatibilism, but I should read more into it. I do not think thought has influence on the material.
Personally I find the predictive processing theory to best fall in line with my own experiences. And so to me, when we act on something like intent for future actions, I would rather say that intent is as an inner predictive model of a future state, whether or not it comes to be is out of our control, things will happen the way they happen.
It is all just atoms chugging along without emotion or thought behind it, intent is just a story we tell ourselves. You do not need intent to explain our actions, in fact it seems less complicated to do so.
I think it’s still a language thing. We are the universe and the hegemonic view seems to be that we are outside acting in it. By “illusory” I do not mean that the phenomenon is not real, but that the (socially constructed) perception of it is not true to reality. I mean it from the Buddhist perspective that if you meditate on it enough there is not individual thing you can call what is socially conceived to be a self.
how does determinism explain development? i feel like it should be viewed, as many things, as a spectrum and not something binary. For me development is the anti-thesis to determinism.
edit: while most things are already determined by our existing material conditions, i think we definitely have a bit of leeway, otherwise we wouldn’t be at this stage of development.
Contradictions are not precluded from determinism. All things are composed of unities of opposites constantly in change. Just because a mechanical materialist may not expect what did happen doesn’t invalidate determinism. The world is absurd, but that doesn’t bring wills into the question.