Thomas_More
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” 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.So now we’re saying the US does want war with China?
How long would both sides then tolerate the heavy losses involved without going nuclear?
See what i mean?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.
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!”
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.
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.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.Russian Christmas today. Both sides pray to God for victory in the killing fields. God must decide which is the holiest killing.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18569/18569-h/18569-h.htm#Free-will
Project Gutenberg. Voltaire.“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.
“One answer is that even if we see free will as an illusion, we can still recognize the social requirements for ethics and morals.”
