this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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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 @redtea@lemmygrad.ml'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.
Intent doesn't have to be post-hoc. If you intend to do something, and then do it, what's wrong with that? There's no metaphysics there, your intent is a material part of you. It's not free will in any sense.
You can, but dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism and the most advanced worldview we currently have. If you want to read more about dialectical materialism here are some articles (article 1, article 2, article 3) or some books such as Lenin's 'Materialism and Empirio-criticism' or maybe 'The Dialectical Biologist' by Levins & Lewontin (specifically the last chapter 'Conclusion: Dialectics' which you can read as a standalone article).
It's not compatibilist. It's firmly materialist. That materialism, however, is not mechanical, and that's what makes it more consistently materialist than mechanist thought. It doesn't posit that our thought has an idealist influence on the material as free will posits. Our thought is firmly material, a property of the matter that makes up our brains and us as a whole. Our thoughts are specific motion of that matter. Therefore, our thoughts do exist and they can influence the material world, again, not in an idealist way, but through our actions. Neither our thoughts nor our actions are free in a free will sense; they are products of our environment, but they do influence the environment back. It's not just a one-sided relationship.
Our "self" exists, but not in an idealist way. If it's a construct, it doesn't make it any less real or any less material. Our choices are not free, but we still do make them. It's always our brain doing the thinking and choosing.
If you view the universe developing as the motion of matter guided by fundamental laws. That movement extends to us as well, as we are parts of the universe. Our thoughts result from that movement. We process information from our environment through our thoughts (or mind in general), then our thoughts influence our actions which influence the environment back. This is a dialectical relationship similar to the base-superstructure relationship in Marxist analysis of society. We have to be here and act to make our history, but our thoughts are material parts of us and thus parts of that whole dialectic. Our thoughts are determined by our material conditions, but we, along with our thoughts, are part of determining the world back. We are active parts of the whole and our mode of action is dependent on our thoughts. We interpret those material conditions through our thoughts which then model our future actions. All these interactions are multi-sided and dialectical, and often full of contradictions, especially if we're not fully conscious of these interactions.
We and "our control" (whatever it encompasses materially) are parts of the universe just as much as the things and the happening, we aren't in a uniquely subordinate or passive role to other events or things. This doesn't mean we can influence certain things as much as they influence us, but that, through our mutual interactions with the whole that is the universe, we can also influence the universe and its parts just like any other thing or event can (in terms of quality, not quantity). We are material just as everything else is. Our influence here is not subjective or idealist. Our perception of our influence is often false and exaggerated (when we think in terms of free will and idealism), but we still do have an influence just as any inanimate object or force might influence something else through the motion of matter, and it's not correct to think of ourselves as uniquely without the ability to influence when everything in the universe has it.
You are correct that atoms don't move by thought, but thought does come from the motion of the atoms; it's a material phenomenon that does exist. Don't you see how your sentence here assumes that our thought is not material and therefore is apart from the rest of the world. The same goes for your sentence before about "thought not having influence on the material". If something cannot have any influence on the material, it cannot also be material itself; our thought, however, is material, and as such can have an influence (even not counting our thoughts guiding our actions, which they do, they have an influence on a micro-scale of the molecules moving and bumping around in our brains that form our thoughts), but, again, not a free influence. In your model, our consciousness would just be a one-way "dead end" that the material world only interacts with while it doesn't interact back in any way. How would we then even be aware of our thoughts at all?
For example, if you burn yourself on a fire, you will learn from it, and the next time you see a fire, you will think about burning yourself last time and avoid doing so again. All of this is purely material. You want to call it "all just atoms chugging along without emotion or thought behind it", but thought is there in the process, it's made from the motion of the specific atoms in our brains, and it has an influence. If matter organized in a specific manner to form us didn't have these properties, we would get burned every time. Our thoughts (conscious and subconscious) are not a separate thing from us or our actions, the relationships between these are also dialectical.
From your model follows that we are just observing from outside the universe through the viewpoint of our bodies and commentating on events we see instead of us (us entirely, our thoughts, which are also just material parts of our bodies, included) being parts of the whole that is our universe. We "tell ourselves" many "stories", which we might call social constructs, but we can see daily the influence these have on us, still without any sort of free will, metaphysics, or departures from materialism.
A priori disregarding intent as a factor in human behavior is a mistake. This doesn't mean that our intent is a primary factor in our behavior or that we should specially focus on it in general, but our intent does exist. That intent isn't anything metaphysical, it's a material thing that's part of us. You will find it impossible to explain human societies and behavior accurately without a dialectical materialist perspective. It was only through this perspective that the laws of social and economic development were (and in general, can be) accurately discerned.
The way I see it, thought as we experience is not a property of the processes of the brain, but rather a consequence or a side product of neurobiological processes. Consciousness (as a conglomerate of present moment qualia) is neither explained by mechanical interactions nor dialectics, we can only guess at it. That said, under either way of materialism it has to map onto some state of the brain / organism that possesses it. So there is a discreet neurological state that corresponds to a thought within our conscious experience. But conscious experience has to be a consequence of that state.
When I say thought can not influence the material, what I mean is, yes, the sum total of brain activation that we perceive as consciousness obviously has an effect on what we do, there are neurons activating, modulating, inhibiting that lead to downstream effects. And there is a sequence of material interactions that lead to that particular state of neuron activation and a set sequence that will follow. So the brain activity has control in the way you put it, in the sense that the activation pattern we see now, directly causes the next, which cascedes on and on. And thus we lift hands, write books, create social revolution and land on the moon. It comes back to atoms just chugging along.
However the counterpart thought we experience within consciousness is simply a consequent phenomenon, some kind of representation of this activation pattern. The conscious (experience of) thought has no power and is predetermined, simply representing a state of brain activation. And thus no actual control is to be found. Theres is simply a set of circumstances, a neurobiological calculation and a set output. Choice, intent and will are things that only exist as experiental approximations of underlying processes. Choice is not a thing that meaningfully exists in the material world, it is simply a complicated way of saying things could have unfolded differently under different circumstances.
We only have control in the sense that we create change in the universe, but then we are simply microscopic a part of an ever-changing universe, it is simply that the universe is changing. This is predicted simply by thermodynamics, there is no need to involve more complex theories to explain this at a fundamental level.
I’m not even sure how dialectical materialsm ties in here all that well, the articles mostly just make slight off-handed remarks about consciousness and overall the theory seems to mostly deal with social organisation. I have to say it reads to me like a bunch of truisms thrown together. Maybe my reading is too brief, but I fail to see where it offers much of meaning.
So, in effect, you are saying that it is a property, only that it's one you assume is irrelevant. Thinking is what our brains do. There isn't some other "real" underlying function of our brains for thoughts to be some irrelevant side effect. I've already written about the contradictions in our perception of these processes in my previous comments.
You've gone into idealism here, painting consciousness as a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. Dialectical materialism is a consistently materialist worldview, and it can explain consciousness through proper study of it. I've given you a rough outline of a dialectical materialist explanation of consciousness in my previous replies.
This is a false assumption and one that's a result of your mechanist thinking. There is no need for there to be discreet states. Our thinking is a process, neuronal circuits are constantly firing, no steady state can encompass it. A similar example are protein conformations which are constantly moving around and changing. This is where dialectics would help you with accepting the fact that change is the "default" state and what we perceive as stable states are in fact also changing, just on different timescales.
But it doesn't. Yes, at the bottom, it's atoms "chugging along", but we're not at a fundamental level, we're talking about consciousness, behavior, and society. You cannot accurately study any phenomena of higher organization of matter only by studying fundamental particles. You keep clinging onto this model of abstract reductionism, but it will not give you an accurate understanding of most phenomena. You seemingly admit that we are active parts of the universe, and then you swerve into calling us "just atoms", which on an atomic level, we are, but there are other levels to us, all still material. We have properties which arise from the specific organization and motion of those atoms as I've demonstrated in my previous reply. A similar error would be calling any molecules "just bunches of atoms" as a way to paint their specific properties or interactions as irrelevant.
You call our thoughts "some kind of representation of this activation pattern" which is wrong. The movement of the matter of our neurons and supporting cells that contribute to our cognitive processes are our thoughts. Our thoughts are properties of that matter that arise from those specific interactions. In your model, again, there is a dualism present, where "we" aren't material and are just somehow observing this from the outside.
You are also making assumptions you shouldn't make and you're abstracting these things in a mechanist way again. These phenomena don't function as simple calculations with a set output, a computer analogy of biological organisms is woefully inaccurate in general and especially in this particular example. There are higher order interactions happening at every step and the only way to make sense of them is through dialectics. Again, you're painting only our consciousness as "powerless" while you're retaining the "power" of other things. Here, you've come to the position that our subconscious thoughts do have "power", but our conscious ones don't. Our consciousness and subconsciousness are not some separate, non-interacting entities, they are both parts of our material mind. They're both "us", it's entirely irrelevant here whether we're talking about conscious or subconscious thought, they function together, and they function rationally. Not to mention that you're contradicting yourself again when you said before (correctly) that "consciousness isn't explained by mechanical interactions", and now you're using exactly mechanical interactions to "explain" consciousness.
The universe is changing, and so are we and our consciousness. We and everything else around us are parts of the universe. You seem to think that by pointing out the whole, you can simply ignore all the constitutive parts. Saying "it's simply a person that's sick" isn't a substitute for a description of pathophysiological processes happening in the body. The scale of our activity in relation to the universe doesn't matter, we're discussing the quality here, not the quantity. You've gone from the abstraction of parts ("it's all just atoms") to an abstraction of the whole ("it's simply the whole universe that's changing"). This, again, doesn't explain anything. We are looking for explanations of how particular parts of the universe function which we can only gain from studying those parts of the universe, not by abstracting to either extreme.
Just because thermodynamics describes change in general in the universe, doesn't mean that it alone explains all the particularities of all the different phenomena occurring at all levels of organization of matter. Yes, it's always present, but more things are added on as complexity increases. You cannot accurately explain human behavior just by studying abstract fundamental particles. There is a reason we have many scientific disciplines and not just particle physics. Yes, they're all inseparably connected, but particle physics or thermodynamics alone aren't enough.
I've been explaining how dialectical materialism "ties in" all throughout this thread. Furthermore, dialectical materialism isn't just a patch that you can "tie in" to bolster some other theory or understanding, it's a consistent and all-encompassing worldview which recognizes the reality of dialectics in our material reality. The articles I linked aren't supposed to give you an answer specifically about consciousness, they are supposed to explain dialectics and dialectical materialism in general and on some common examples. Once you have a good understanding, you can apply it yourself. The articles do mostly deal with social organization because that's what Marxism is primarily about, however, the Marxist method is dialectical materialism which is universally applicable. Take a look at the chapter of 'The Dialectical Biologist' I mentioned if you want a greater focus on natural science.
If all you see are a "bunch of truisms" then I don't really know what you read, because that's certainly not the case in any of the articles or books I mentioned. You admit that you're unfamiliar with dialectical materialism and yet, instead of trying to educate yourself, you just keep going along with your mechanist worldview (that's rife with contradictions, as I've been pointing out) while complaining that you don't understand dialectics without even really trying. You don't respond to any points I make, and you just move on to "new" points which are mostly just your old points recycled, but slightly changed in an attempt to get around my critique which you never specifically address. You keep retreating into "it's just some atoms chugging along" as if it's some profound wisdom, but it's just a cover for your model's inability to accurately explain human thought, behavior, or society (and plenty of other natural phenomena). It seems like I'm just repeating myself at this point, so I won't be continuing this discussion any further.
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.