Free will an absurdity
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Why is intelligence problematic? We are all intelligent. That does not mean we are all rational, although the irrational (i.e. the religious fanatic) are rational in their own opinion.
The formation of a political ideology is an intelligent act. It might be dangerous and harmful (i e. Maoism, Hitlerism), but it has to be constructed by intelligence. A table or a chair can’t do it. It has to be the product of intelligent beings. But these intelligent beings are not plucking ideas from the air. They are themselves products of a society and are within the chain of cause and effect, both societal and personal. To be sure, they are then themselves causes, giving rise to more effects, but within the chain, not beyond it. As they were effects, so they became causes giving rise to other effects which were more causes producing effects on them. All life is within this dynamic, including the one who frames and/or follows an ideology or accepts a philosophy.
Moral agency. One’s morality is likewise societally, experientially, and thus both internally and externally produced by a chain of antecedents. One person’s moral code, and one society’s moral values, can well be different from another’s. No doubt Hitler and Truman both considered themselves moral, not immoral, agents.
Since all moral agents are also within the chain of cause and effect, i see no contradiction with what you call determinism and I call necessarianism. To be a moral agent whose will is not motivated, but free, you would have to be a first cause, i e. God, outside of all life and without motive (hence, not a material entity but a supernatural one) issuing unmotivated edicts from on high.More simply put.
Your morality has been produced in you as a result of your life experiences, thoughts, feelings, relationships with others and with the society you were born into.
You think, feel and act in accordance with (except when constrained by others, i e. wage slavery, obedience to a boss) what is moral and right behaviour in your produced opinion. This opinion, or sense of morality you feel to be freely yours, but it too is the result of the motivations, feelings, ideas, produced in you by multitudes of causes and effects in you, both conscious and subconscious.
To be sure, you are a moral agent, you possess a will, and act as it dictates; but it is not free of the causes and effects that have moulded it and is not independent of them.You are a DETERMINED, produced, moral agent, your actions producing effects and continuing the line of cause and effect: within it, not a God outside and above it. Your will is not free and you are not free to will. You do, however, act according to your unfree will, a will that is itself an effect as well as a cause of more effects.
Just a bit extra, for a scientific bent:
I am fortunate in that my father was a materialist (and an SPGB member). My philosophical reading were the materialists. Ancient as well as modern.
Were you raised a Christian?
Most people are raised either religiously, but more modern, nominally, Christian. Children were smacked and grow up just accepting free will, without thinking about it, and in a society that is blame-oriented.
“Who’s to blame?”
“It’s your fault.”
“No, it’s your fault.”
“It’s those bloody immigrants!”
“You bumped into me!”
“No, you bumped into me!”
“He’s just bloody-minded.”
“He’s the one that done it.”Behaviour is seen as freely originating, with no reference to cause.
Hence, blame is endemic, and if someone says free will is a myth, he’s a “bleedin’ heart liberal.”Free will is a parrotted term (apologies to parrots!) thrown around and seldom if ever explored, except by academics.
“Good and Evil”, Original Sin, reward and punishment, all are part of a religious scenario that is ingrained in the mass of people, including professed atheists. They are culturally visceral.
They have always also proven useful to ruling classes since antiquity, and the stick with which to beat materialists has always been “morality “
BD – I agree with most of what you say and indeed you restate the very point I was trying to make. However we dedicate ourselves to educating the working class to a level where they can understand their class and its revolutionary role. This is quite an elevated concept for many and if we are to have a mass movement then your contention that only those who are ‘talented’ in this area can achieve consciousness makes the revolution impossible.
TM – Intelligence has always been a problematic concept because it seems impossible to measure and define different levels of it within the human population. I only mention it because you gave me the impression that you thought it was an important factor in the development of moral and political character. Your determinism makes internal moral debate seem redundant but we all constantly wrestle with opposing scenarios before we act and are not moral automatons.There are not different levels of intelligence, only different levels of understanding.
I.Q. is bogus.
S.J. Gould wrote a book about this.No, i know many people who are not socialists but have better characters than some socialists do.
Why is internal moral debate redundant? I am doing it all the time with myself. I know that i will yield and make a decision according to the strongest motive that presents itself. A free will, on the other hand, would be independent of motive, and therefore impervious. It would have no morality or immorality, because it doesn’t exist.Your wrestling, or inner conflicts, mean that opposing motives have presented themselves. You will, however, yield to the strongest acting upon your will, not the weakest, and your choice will be made accordingly.
You are conflicted because you are thinking in a non-material, idealist way, without being aware of it. I, however, have no such dilemma.
You think there is an entity called “you” inside your body, inside your brain, receiving audiences like a king, or god, and whose decisions are independent of material motion. Christians call this fiction the “soul”, which is answerable, motivelessly, for its thoughts, desires and actions.
But there is no such thing.“Walpola Rahula points out in What the Buddha Taught, “If the whole of existence is relative, conditioned and interdependent, how can will alone be free? Will, like any other thought, is conditioned. So-called ‘freedom’ itself is conditioned and relative.”
“the idea of free will is part of the larger human illusion that we are the central focus of all creation. Consider the belief held until the early 1600s that the Earth was at the center of the universe. This belief was challenged by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, who put the sun at the center of our solar system and made our observations of the heavens much easier to explain. Although resisted by some at first, this new way of thinking gradually entered into mainstream thought.
Two hundred fifty years later Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection removed humans from the pedestal of special creation. Nevertheless, many still believe that humans must occupy a special place in the evolutionary scheme, perhaps as the inevitable peak of evolution on Earth.” The second question raised by accepting the absence of free will deals with moral responsibility. Although biological evolution in humans has not changed much over the last 50,000 years, cultural evolution has shaped the biological imperatives for survival into religious and civil laws. If there is no free will, are these laws meaningless? What happens to good and bad, reward and punishment? One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.
” In the end, we can embrace this paradox like a Zen koan: we can live our lives as though we have free will yet realize it is just an illusion. This may be the ultimate freedom.”
∞
From the Fall 2001 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 18, No. 1)
Text © 2001 Robert FraserTM- ‘You will, however, yield to the strongest acting upon your will, not the weakest, and your choice will be made accordingly.’
In other words you believe that we are moral automatons.
TM-‘You think there is an entity called “you” inside your body, inside your brain, receiving audiences like a king, or god, and whose decisions are independent of material motion.’
You’re not very good at this debating thing are you – telling people what they think is very annoying and confrontational. Like Freud I think the ego, the ‘you’, is an evolutionary entity that enhances survival. As I keep saying, to your apparently deaf ears, I too am a determinist but I believe the theory can and does erode individual moral agency and dehumanizes. Despite your name (real or not) you seem to have a deep contempt for Christianity and perhaps this is what drives your contempt for agency or ‘free will’ as you call it. Have you heard this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00z5y9z
“One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.”
‘One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.’
I like that but it goes against the socialist grain a bit since we value ‘truth’ above all things.
“dehumanizes.”
You see i have no problem because i don’t see humans as “above” anything. We are an animal species, material organisms, including our wills, which are the effects of sense impressions, external and internal motion.
I don’t feel uncomfortable about that, any more than i feel uncomfortable about being on a rotating globe in what is mostly darkness. I’m not the centre of everything and don’t need to be.
I think, for the sake of your comfort, you should probably give up determinism, which is causing you problems. Why do you consider yourself a determinist?
The motive in you to believe in free will, because you feel the opposite diminishes your sense of moral agency, seems so strong, you maybe should yield to it, and reject a materialism which you feel is reductionist.
I have always thought idealists who want a socialist world, just as materialist members do, should not be barred from the party.
TM-‘The motive in you to believe in free will, because you feel the opposite diminishes your sense of moral agency, seems so strong, you maybe should yield to it, and reject a materialism which you feel is reductionist.’
There you go again, telling me what I think. I was a materialist probably before you were born so don’t be telling me that I’m an idealist. I’ve said that I accept that: ‘One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.’ but don’t like it because it points to a weakness in materialism/determinism. Here’s something I wrote many years ago that might set your heart at rest: https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2017/2010s/no-1357-september-2017/crime-and-capital/
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