Free will an absurdity
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I'm waiting for our feathered friend joining the fray so we can witness the battle of the hobby horses.
John Oswald wrote:How would you reply to THE WESTERN SOCIALIST writer's statement, seeing that he was also conversant with Engels, but rejects the term "free will."?I'd say it's a mistake to think that all that "free will" can mean is *ABSOLUTE* free will in the sense of "A". And then gives examples of why I think this is the case. Two papers to read would be "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person" by Harry Frankfurt and "Freedom and Resentment" by PF Strawson. Then I'd leave them to it. Which is what I'm going to do now…
There are 3 basic positions we can take on this question of free will – the hard determinist postion that everything we do is determined or caused and therefore free will is an illusion- the indeterminist position that we have absolute free will to chose whatever we want- the soft determinist position that we have free will but it is constrained and limited by the circumstances we find ourselves in I will focus mainly on the first and third of these. Sam Harris in his book Free Will (Free Press New York 2012) advances the case for hard determinism The argument boils down to this: any event or action that happens must happen because of an antecedent cause of which it is an effect There can be no such thing as an event that happens for no reason at all. Therefore the proposition that we can somehow escape, or rise above, the nexus of causality through the exercise of "free will " is manifestly false. Even the very choices that we seemingly freely make are caused and so are not really free ar all. However, hard determinism possesses a soft underbelly that renders it vulnerable to attack. In the first place, the contention that no actions are free is an unfalsifiable proposition which admits no counterexample; it is not testable in terms of scientific methodology. Moreover it confuses coercion with causation. There is surely an important qualitative difference between having to do something when a gun is pointed at your head and doing it voluntarily. You may say both actions are caused in some sense but that in no way clinches the argument for hard determinism. John Horgan makes a rather telling point in this regard in his review of Harris' book, as follows: "But just because my choices are limited doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Just because I don’t have absolute freedom doesn’t mean I have no freedom at all. Saying that free will doesn’t exist because it isn’t absolutely free is like saying truth doesn’t exist because we can’t achieve absolute, perfect knowledge.Harris keeps insisting that because all our choices have prior causes, they are not free; they are determined. Of course all our choices are caused. No free-will proponent I know claims otherwise. The question is how are they caused? Harris seems to think that all causes are ultimately physical, and that to hold otherwise puts you in the company of believers in ghosts, souls, gods and other supernatural nonsense.But the strange and wonderful thing about all organisms, and especially our species, is that mechanistic physical processes somehow give rise to phenomena that are not reducible to or determined by those physical processes. Human brains, in particular, generate human minds, which while subject to physical laws are influenced by non-physical factors, including ideas produced by other minds. These ideas may cause us to change our minds and make decisions that alter the trajectory of our world."(http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/04/09/will-this-post-make-sam-harris-change-his-mind-about-free-will/) What Horgan is alluding to here is Emergence Theory. This is well explained by David Graeber in summing up the broad outlines of Roy Bhaskar's "critical realist" approach: Reality can be divided into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be reduced to physics so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology. Different sorts of mechanisms are operating on each. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below: it would be impossible to even talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical and biological processes….the higher the emergent strata one is dealing with, the less predictable things become, the involvement of human beings of course being the most unpredictable factor of all (Graeber D, 2001, Towards and Anthroplogical Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave p.52-53) The view that everything has a cause and, in that sense, is a necessary consequence of what preceded it is called "mechanical determinism" which is not the same thing as "teleological determinism". In the fomer case, it is what happened in the past that determines what is happening now as per David Hume's famous observation in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), that "The cause must be prior to the effect." With teleological determinism, by contrast, it is the future, in a manner of speaking – in the sense of a goal that we are striving towards – that explains what is happening now. A given effect is to be explained in terms of its final cause or purpose – its "telos". So for example , philosophers going all the way back to Aristotle have argued that the natural world around us shows clear signs of teleological or purposeful design and that this is proof positive of the immanence of "Gods will" (and hence, also, the existence of God). Mechanical determinism, by contrast, is not concerned with final causes at all but merely "efficient causes". Efficient causality which makes a given effect dependent on prior events is, of course, what interests science in its endeavour to understand phenomena. So rather than see the natural world as displaying signs of purposeful design , it sees it instead as the purposeless outcome of mechanical laws – natural selection However with the advent of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century this mechanistic view of the universe has been called into question. Concepts such as Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, the Observer Effect , the Butterfly Effect etc etc have enterered into modern scientific discourse. Have a look at this interesting little youtube presentationhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQKELOE9eY4 All this does not mean that mechanical determinism has now been "refuted" , only that it cannot in itself provide all the answers. What applies to the physical or natural sciences applies even more so to the social sciences, in my view It is significant that Marx welcomed Darwin's book as finally having put paid to teleological think in the natural sciences. But I dont think this amounts to a rejection of teleological thinking altogether. At the macro level of society in general we may very well question whether there is a some predetermined goal – for instance, socialism – towards which we are inevitably moving. (Paradoxically enough, "inevitablism" in this sense within the early socialist movement expressed by people like Karl Kautsky was a product of 19th century thinking when mechanical determinism was the reigning paradigm). However, at the micro level of individuals we are all of us clearly subject to teleological thinking – we have goals which determine our present actions – and this is very much tied up with the question of free will It seems to me that while Marx rejected teleological thinking in some respects, I dont think this can be interpreted as a wholesale endorsement of mechnical determinism either. He did allow room for the contingent and the unpredictable in his view of history. As he put it "individuals make their own history, but not of their own free will, not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted" (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852). What Marx seems to be rejecting here is not the idea – central to the notion of morality itself, incidentally – that humans can choose, can exercise free will, but rather that they are not at liberty to choose – or rather, to achieve – just whatever they want. They cannot; they are clearly constrained by material circumstances and it is in that sense, referring to the general pattern of history itself, that Marx is saying the outcome is not the result of their own free will. The same might be said of Marx's statement that “men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will” in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It is not that "will" is being denied here; all that is being asserted is that the relations into which human beings enter are pre-constituted in the form of particular social institutions that predate our own existence and which, of necessity, we have to deal with as individuals I would say this makes Marx a "soft" determinist, rather than a "hard" determinist and therefore someone who did allow some scope for the exercise of free will
John Oswald wrote:Free will linked to human chauvinism: .Not necessarily. Maybe some other animal species, apart from human beings that is, exercise "free will" too. Check out this rather interesting linkhttp://www.sci-news.com/biology/chimpanzees-cumulative-culture-04914.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BreakingScienceNews+%28Breaking+Science+News%29
Did you take a look at the Voltaire and Godwin links?
So it is the nature of the animal we call human to manipulate her natural environment. That too, though, is her nature. She is still bound by the laws of nature, and operates and functions as part of the cosmos.So let us accept that it is the term "free will" which we differ on. It grates on my sense of consistency, especially as others in the movement – the author of the WS article and other materialists – agree with me on it and you do not, whilst all of us are scientific socialists.It is this inconsistency of language that calls out to be addressed, does it not?Last question: your children are reading Voltaire on free will, and ask you about it. What do you tell them? That the definition has changed, or the reality?
John Oswald wrote:Last question: your children are reading Voltaire on free will, and ask you about it. What do you tell them? That the definition has changed, or the reality?I'd say once people looked at it, it turned out that it wasn't as simple as the people that use definition "A" would have thought. It has always been used in a broad way the whole way through.Also I'd give them some modern science books. Mechanistic 19th century crude materialism is defunct, but there is still something we can all "materialism".
You see, I would say that a broader and vital materialism makes free will even more absurd than mechanical materialism does, because a broad materialism comprehends greater complexity in the organism and hence a multitude of subconscious as well as conscious motivations, even inside us socialists, who are human after all. And I will continue to challenge those who use the term "free will" in daily parlance.
As if by magic this podcast has just showed up in my feed. I think some people might like it:“What Animals Can Teach Us about Free Will”http://news.prairiepublic.org/post/what-animals-can-teach-us-about-free-will
DJP’s quote from Engels [post #2] expresses — in the vernacular — Marx’s scientific view on the relationship between freedom and necessity.[Of course, any ‘thinker’ can raise himself above the necessity of the world, and is perfectly “free” to defy the material world before succumbing to its necessity.The most notable modern politico to defy social necessity, through his idealist will, is, of course, Lenin, whose succumbing to the necessity of the world, Engels expressed — in the vernacular — 70 years earlier.]Unbeknownst to me, Alan has reproduced an earlier post of mine in defence of Engels’s much later “freedom is the recognition of necessity” at:http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/freedom-is-recognition-of-necessity.html?q=TwcPurely ‘philosophical’ pronouncements on this issue reduce science to nothing more than “thinking that is isolated from practice — a purely scholastic question” [from Thesis II].
As THE WESTERN SOCIALIST is revered by the SPGB, its articles considered classics and its marxism top notch, how do you explain the article, itself considered a classic? When homosexuals were imprisoned, beaten and repressed, why didn't they exercise free will and be heterosexual? When in love, how come one has to let the suffering wear itself out? There are those who don't give a damn and simply f… and forget, but they are not considered people of much sensibility.
And quoting Engels like scripture doesn't wash, when he and Marx are outdated in many ways, the by no means least of which are the expectation of socialism in their near future, and their Victorian "species ladder" darwinism!
John Oswald wrote:When homosexuals were imprisoned, beaten and repressed, why didn't they exercise free will and be heterosexual?I've never heard someone describe "free will" as doing something because they have been cohersed to do it. I wonder why that is?
It's all about the degree of coercion.Your will is likewise "coerced" to make a choice, but not always painfully.
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