Free will an absurdity
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TM – ‘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.’
Of course we are ‘above’ all other species because we are an example of the universe becoming conscious of itself. Suck it up TM and all the responsibilities it implies.
Just remembered about this, seems Engels was a ‘compatibilist’ too.
“Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with real knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, with so much the greater necessity is the content of this judgment determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choke among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows by: this precisely that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control, Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch09.htmNothing in here about the requirement of an absence of external (or internal) influences.
Some more on Sam Harris here, from the Ben Burgis who wrote the ‘Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left’ book:
https://benburgis.substack.com/p/sam-harris-has-nothing-useful-to
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18569/18569-h/18569-h.htm#Free-will
Project Gutenberg. Voltaire.Again, Wez, as i’ve told you, i am posed with no dilemma with regard to me holding to my moral convictions and acting thereupon.
It does not subtract anything from them because i have been persuaded to hold them, as opposed to my “free will” cavalierly adopting them free of any motive to do so.as opposed to my “free will” cavalierly adopting them free of any motive to do so.
This is a description of caprice, not freedom.
A life where you just acted at random, regardless of your prior values or knowledge, would not be a life of freedom.
No, it would be a life of free will, and it would be awful, with no morality and no motives for any thought or action.
And since one would only have the thoughts and feelings one wants to have, there would be no political activity. Firstly, it would be pointless, since no one’s will would be subject to any persuasion, and secondly, one wouldn’t be fazed by any evil or injustice whatsoever. Feeling only as you want to feel, you wouldn’t experience any love, hatred, sorrow, grief, anger, or indignation.
There would be no relationship with anything at all.But seriously, who – apart from someone wanting to attack an aunt-sally – uses “free will” in the way you’ve described it here (as living a life of total caprice)?
Anyway, I’m going to leave this for now.
If i hold to the classical meaning of the term free will, the meaning that the classic materialists (and even some deists) attacked, it is because i believe language is important and the past something to learn from.
As Orwell said, “Loose thinking leads to the loose use of words, but the loose use of words also leads to loose thinking.”
Whatever we may think of the personalities and milieux of the classical 18th century materialists, whatever they might be behind in today, they were the foundation stones of modern materialism.
If we attach any meaning we like to historical terms like “free will”, where is our connection to our materialist heritage? Why insist on definitions at all, for anything?
And people who want to learn from the past, they will be flummoxed when reading Voltaire et al. and coming across “free will”, or “necessity”, and other terms. Treat language capriciously and you get a lexical free-for-all of loose words and loose 🤔 thinking.
To say that free will has been proven since the debates of the 18th century, you would have to prove that it is now known that we are responsible for our wishes, our thoughts and our feelings, and that we will to will, want to want, and wish to wish, and that our feelings are freely chosen, and spring from nothing but themselves.
Rather like telling a child whose parents have just been killed and the family home destroyed, “Why are you crying? Be happy!”
And THE WESTERN SOCIALIST in 1972 understood the definition of free will in the same, classical, way as I do.
Again:
” the most vital argument that the Socialist advances against free will is that its acceptance precludes the possibility of a science of sociology. The Socialist expounds the principle of laws acting behind social causation. If man, individually and en masse, is a creature of caprice, if he thinks and acts independently of his heredity and social milieu, then the search for laws supposed to govern human history, economics and social relations is forever doomed to futility. The acceptance of free will is a flat denial of social science.”
THE WESTERN SOCIALIST.
” Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all.”
Albert Einstein.The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-28-vw-322-story.html
TM – To say that we are the only species (on this planet) that is conscious of the laws of nature is not arrogance but a fact.
So you see evolution, nature, as a ladder, an hierarchy. That is your arrogance.
So your imperfect sense of the laws of nature (since you want your will to be free of those laws) means you know about Saturn and Jupiter and Das Kapital, but your power of smell will never approach that of a dog, nor your agility that of a monkey. An elephant and a lion do not NEED to know the workings of a computer or car engine.
Your insistence on SUPERIOR and INFERIOR, on HIGH and LOW, says more about you and the society you are from than about the diversity and splendour of nature. Your need to be centre-stage says a lot about your fear and insecurity faced with the cosmos and with your minuscule place in it.
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