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Determinism W
(lemmygrad.ml)
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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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How can free will possibly exist though? There are no science compatible arguments for it.
Free will is a metaphysical question that science cannot address. It can rule out some false claims about it, like some historical religious claims, but not the basic metaphysical question. Over time science will only build more and more specific explanations that show minds to be contingent on biological, chemical, physical, mechanisms and a relatively straightforward framework of causal reality. It will seem to narrow down the possibility for free will because it makes the space occupied by a ghost in the machine smaller and more fringe, but this is drawing too much from the religious tradition of blurring metaphysical and scientifically investigable questions - it will address only those hypotheses that confuse the two the same way it addresses the falsehood of all animals being created in their current forms all at once.
The kind of thinking you're referring to is called vulgar materialism by Marxists and Marx and Engels specifically criticized it; it's incompatible with the basic Marxist framing of political organization. Lenin famously derogatorily referenced the quote, "the brain secretes thought in the same way as the liver secretes bile" and spent a lot of time crapping on it.
Vulgar materialism lends a helping hand to the ruling class as it gives a definitive answer to the question of whether you "should" decide to politically organize and foment revolution: "no and your question is invalid because you can't choose to do anything". Dialectical materialism is a direct response to both an idealistic dialectic (Hegel) and vulgar materialists (positivist-inclined liberals).
Humans have no issue with identifying cause and effect in everything but their own heads. To believe we are immune or that it is "unknown" is akin to believing in the soul imo. We aren't special. Just another part of the universe.
Being part of the universe doesn't change the metaphysical question, it just rejects a historical religious framing of it. Souls, a ghost in the machine, etc. Most people believe in the latter and have for a very long time, so it's understandable that this is the usual object of the critique, but it doesn't exhaust the question.
The vulgar materialism criticized by Marx, Lenin, etc is a passive one that will happily include social relations in its purview. It is primarily called vulgar in contrast to being dialectical. Where Marx, Lenin, etc see a capacity to drive revolution through class consciousness and revolutionary consciousness, emphasizing that this is a necessary piece of revolution that interplays with material conditions, their predecessors (and contemporaries, and subsequent critics) would more often stand back and say that the events unfolded due to, simply, the material conditions.
Here's a Lenin quote among many: "The new Iskra-ist method of expressing its views reminds one of Marx’s opinion (in his famous) of the old materialism, which was alien to the ideas of dialectics. The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, said Marx, the point, however, is to change it"
Lenin's analysis is simple, possibly even simplistic compared to what he was referencing, but he played a big part in defining what the term means.
Althusser is also a good read on this: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1953/onmarx/on-marxism.htm .
I offered a framing like that - that choice exists constrained by material conditions (historically contingent, etc) - and OP rejected it and started talking about 2 or 3 other things. You may want to reconsider who the "we" is referring to and if you really agree with each other. As a reminder, they also said free will was disproven by science lol.
I think several folks here are just starting to learn about these things and are making mistakes. That's not a problem in itself unless there's a resistance to seeking understanding, of adopting defensive behavior rather than accepting and contending with criticism, etc. Then it becomes difficult to share understanding and mutually arrive at correct thinking.
If you read what I've said elsewhere in this thread, you'll find several quotations, references, and reframings that all say the same basic thing about the nature of choice, will, etc in diamat as characterized by Marx and Marxists. A lot of it overlaps with what you're saying, but none of it seemed to resonate with any of those rm disagreeing with me. What do you think that says about the positions here and the nature of the disagreement?
PS this statement is... not correct: "I just think the original conception of “free will”- the very specific idea that every individual is some sort of anime-level entity capable of determining everything about their life through sheer willpower, which is used to justify hating the poor, the unhealthy, or the infirm- is complete bourgoisie bullshit." I doubt anyone knows the first conception but even the old ones were more sophisticated than this. Even the organized religious ones were. And they all predate capitalism and the bourgeois class.
Exactly, but where does dialectics debunk determinism. It's very easy to have a dialectical view of nature and still not believe in free will.
That's not generally how philosophy works. I'm just pointing out the basis of diamat as framed by Marx et al. You are free to hold whatever position you want, I don't really care, but holding hard and fast to determinism and no free will is a rejection of diamat.
How? I am no mechanical materialist, I just didn't realize I need to write an essay on dialectics to show such. Believing in "free" will is a rejection of diamat because it implies an entity beyond material reality with the power to control one's body.
I have said how several times already.
I am a dialectical materialist. The material world is a lot more complicated than some determinists make it seem. Just because there are contradictions in everything doesn’t mean determinism is disproven.
One of Marx's main things was in picking fights with Feuerbach on this exact issue, though, and Dialectical Materialism is strictly incompatible with vulgar materialism.
This is an interesting reading on the topic: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/
I'm not saying you can't personally be a determinist but it is a contradiction to say someone is both diamat and a materialist determinist.
From that reading: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated"
Unless "materialist determinist" means something incongruous with the words used to name it here, you're being silly. The material dialectic is one of matter with matter. There can be no coherent Marxism that isn't one of compatibilism on the basis that humans are materially reducible but what they can be reduced to is still much more complex than just receptacles of their experiences.
In essence, there are crass materialists who use determinism to try to smuggle absurdly abstracted fatalism in the garb of science (and the lazy meme in the OP comes off as this), but that has nothing to do with a proper materialist assessment.
???
OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action. Early on, Marx struggled with this in critiques of Feuerbach et al and eventually settled on a more coherent conceptualization of dialectical materialism that centered social forces. A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don't call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.
OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.
I would say that vulgar materialism is still proper materialist, it's just not Marxist.
I'm not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it's pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully, and that's what would be needed to go back and forth on a level deeper than where I'm trying to keep it: "Marx said X" and not "Marx was right because [nerd terms]". I also don't think it really matters other than to push back against, as you mention, fatalistic thinking. This tends to paralyze in either extreme: that revolution is inevitable so you can observe the world without dedicating yourself to revolution or that you lack agency and the future is simply out of your hands, good or bad. I'd like to see folks joining and creating orgs and gaining the skills of getting people to engage in collective action.
There are different kinds of determinism that get called materialist, and my argument hinges on separating them. As an example, there is economic determinism (here is someone arguing Marx is not that), which though metaphysically materialist is idealist in the Marxist sense of relying on abstraction that rejects some aspects of causality in the material world. In The German Ideology, for example, he refers to Hegelians as idealist in this special sense because they considered only, to put it crassly, their intellectual circlejerking over Consciousness and so on as though all of humanity was causally downstream from this when that is plainly not the case. Likewise, though it appears more materialist than whatever the Hegelians were doing, economic determinism is still discounting the causality of non-economic factors in the world and therefore meets this particular definition of idealist. Among these non-economic factors, of course, are things like the person's own psychology, or those aspects which cannot be credited to their economic position (we can start with their perception of space if it must be proved that such aspects exist).
So what I'm complaining about are determinist framings that claim the idea of materialism while discounting factors that exist within material reality. Whether you choose to act or not is itself a material factor, and the fact that Laplace's Demon could have predicted it is beside the point. There is no overarching I-Swear-This-Is-Materialist-Guys Destiny that operates independently from your choices, those choices are part of the causal chain as they are both caused and causing. Anyone who uses a phrase like OP of "free will is an illusion" is surely deluding themselves into quietism with a belief in some kind of destiny that is absolutely at odds with sincere materialism. Such people are just renaming Fate to Science and misappropriating scientific anecdotes and rhetoric to clumsily defend this sleight-of-hand.
OP is being silly, but my point is that a compatibilist framing is one that endorses the idea of free will as an element of a nonetheless-deterministic system, which I think is the only way one can do Marxism coherently. Then again, I suppose this position comes from the fact that I think you need compatibilism to do anything coherently, so this isn't nearly as focused an argument as I thought it was (and I didn't think it was very focused to begin with).
In my defense, I do read Schopenhauer sometimes, but what you really mean I assume are the more popular authors like the Hegelians and so on. I do make some effort to read Engels carefully, but he has the merit of not being as interested in Hegel as Marx.
It sounds like we have basically the same opinion but just expressed it in ways that lead to miscommunication, lol.
If I were to tweak something to match my approach more closely, it's that I consider diamat to be closer to a framework of investigation, one epistemology (that I'm a fan of) among several, just like "the" scientific method or the accumulated knowledge of communities that doesn't fit cleanly into a Eurocentric framing. I don't really need it to be more than that, so I'm okay with the idea that it also has its limitations. What matters is that we can become more determined and better at building revolution - and diamat definitely helps in one's thinking about it.
Re: 19th century German philosophers I have regrettably read many. It's only useful for exactly this topic, which is to say, not very. Wiederholen sie auf Deutsch. Okay it's also useful for one other thing: I can make toxic Trots and DSA libs shut up sometimes irl.
Fun fact: Freud used plain German words for id, ego, etc. Academics that love to get up their own asses decided to make them Latin in translation.
Fair enough, that's what most of these things end up being
I dislike the idea of reducing diamat to "merely" a lens to view things rather than a scientific method that can and should be developed to overcome whatever limitations it has. You might like this essay, which unfortunately I can only find in audio form now. I don't like show-and-tell philosophy where everything is a toy to be played with and then put away, it feels nihilistic.
That doesn't mean its proven, either. The quantum mechanical world does not appear to fit our deterministic models. It suggests those models are only approximations of reality, that they only have a useful predictive capacity within a cosmically narrow set of conditions.
GOOD post
Why thank you!