this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Death to NATO
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That's not being a 'determinist', that's just plain old mathematical certainty, considering Russia's powerful industrial output, technological superiority, population advantage and supreme military experience. Also - overpriced NATO wonder weapons proved their papertigerness.
The US, the neocon monsters, those with actual competence... My take is - either the vast majority of them or ALL of them knew the impossibility of victory on the battlefield. That was not the point anyway
I know, I'm just wondering if I'd imagine there were different possible outcomes if I believed in free will.
Free will doesn't include willing a thermobaric not to kill you when it has just detonated at your feet.
I was just looking at new replies to the thread and felt my old one here was too quippy. What I really mean is that you can divide a materialistic free will argument into the following camps: Compatibilists, people too caught up in definitions, and deranged people who believe things completely at odds with directly observable reality. There are no other camps (I'm inducting you into the first one, if you complain that puts you in camp two). People who believe in free will typically believe very similar things in any practical circumstance to people who don't, there's just a disagreement on an ontological level about how hypothetically predictable it all is in the most absolute sense of the term (and honestly, even that is being charitable about the level of substance really present in the disagreement).
I say this to say that one's position in this debate -- if you can get them to agree that ghostly souls probably don't exist -- is unlikely to correlate with their stance on the war almost at all, because the same factors are at play in both cases and the phantom of "free" choice doesn't weigh very heavily on understanding in practical terms how people make choices in life.
Yeah, compatibilism makes sense if you believe in souls, specific definitions are stupid, do you believe in something at least partially beyond material factors that can make decisions? The last type just seem stupid.
Compatibilism is the stance that the will observed in a deterministic system is free. There are many angles to approach it from, but the way that I believe is the easiest to think about it is this: People can only really understand causality as being predictable or random, and randomness seems to be a poor refuge for free choice (as often as some people try to make this so), so one needs to seriously consider the idea that the "free will" that people on that side of the argument are referring to is a completely incoherent idea. It's not just something that doesn't exist, but something that could never exist and can only be made legitimate-sounding by mysticizing it. Whatever it is, for choice to meaningfully be choosing, it needs to have order (such as values in the form of preferences), and the extent to which it doesn't is the extent to which it is not a choice but instead represents a lack of agency.
Simultaneously, the "free will is an illusion" crowd I think are making an inversion of the same mistake by claiming there is no free will because something that cannot exist does not exist. What people are clearly looking for is an explanation of the connection between the experienced phenomenon of willing and causality. There is no need to reference "illusion" to explain a person willing something, the ordered system of the brain doing what it does in response to its environment is just an example of what choice looks like from the outside, which is neither more nor less true than what it looks like from the inside.
People who claim to be materialists but then cite determinism to call choices meaningless are either playing with words or are idealists in disguise. There is no overarching Fate that dictates how things will go independent of the particular material causes, and how you choose is one of those causes! It is not an Uncaused Cause, to use the theological phrase, but it is still a cause just as much as it is the effect of whatever input you received. You aren't the ultimate inception point of the causal chain (you can't even imagine what that proposition means), but you aren't a loose end either. That, too, would be idealist.
I wholeheartedly agree. By "determinism" I just mean the idea that free will cannot exist. The universe is absurd, there is no fate. By "illusion" I mean consciousness gives people the feeling of being above nature.
This is now a tangent, but I feel obliged to point out that, as even Camus admits, absurdity is a property of relations and not a thing itself. Specifically, it is an attempt to have an impossible relationship, like trying to draw blood from a stone. The wild error that Camus makes in the Myth of Sisyphus is considering only man's relation to the universe itself in seeking personal fulfillment rather than man's relation to fellow humans. It is absurd too seek something from the universe itself where the universe somehow acknowledges you, but existence becomes much less cold when you remember that other people exist.
Very true, I use "absurd" to primarily mean that it appears improbable and crazy in our consciousnesses when we consider it. Even if the universe could only go one way as a result of its conditions it's a miracle it went this way and produced life. If there are infinite universes as some theories propose, I imagine most of them wouldn't have turned out nearly like this.