Maz wrote:
What I want to know is that without dialectics, how does one explain free will as a materialist.I think free will is an
illusion that results from the fact that our brains are limited in their ability to know "all causes" and their relative "strengths".
Consider a person deliberating over their next meal, for example. They might bring to mind a number of things: what they ate in their last meal, what's in the refrigerator, could they afford to go out and eat and, if so, where, etc., etc.
Whatever they choose, it looks "like" a "free choice"...an exercise of "free will".
What I suspect is that if it were possible to get right "down" to the electro-chemical processes going on in the brain, the flow of currents and chemicals, etc....we'd be able to predict that "free choice" in advance of it being made -- or, slightly more realistically, we'd be able to predict a small number of possible outcomes and assign a probability to each.
On a matter of more interest to us, how is it that someone "decides" to be a communist? We know there are materialist explanations, but what exactly are they and how do they function to produce that result?
What's actually at work, I think, are a few (obvious) "strong causes" and a
huge number of largely unknown "weak causes".
Most of the "weak causes" are unknown to the person deciding to become a communist...so it appears that s/he has made a "free choice".
But if we were able to grasp all those "weak causes" and measure their relative strength, I think we would be able to tell in advance who would decide to become a communist and even when they were most likely to do that.
Thus, though it does not seem to us that way, I think all of our decisions are "inevitable" with a very high degree of probability.
We are "part of history" (especially our own) and there is no escape from that except death.
Does that mean large-scale events are also "inevitable"? I'm pretty sure it does...but predicting them in useful detail would be even more difficult than predicting an individual's decisions. We have this multitude of causes (a few are strong, the vast majority are weak) and then we would also need to know how millions of these collections of causes will all interact with each other.
Perhaps a quantum computer as large as the known universe could both gather and process this information...we humans will
never be able to do it.
Thus what bourgeois historians label "contingency" (because it sounds more erudite than
chance) is actually the sum of millions of material causal factors too small to measure or even perceive.
If I nonetheless argue that you "should" become a communist, it's because I
can't do otherwise. If you find my arguments compelling and decide to become a communist, it's because you didn't really have any choice in the matter.
We act "as if" we had free will because a crude sense of purposeful activity seems to be "hard-wired" into living organisms...but I think it's an illusion, a product of the subjectivity of our own brains.
Maz wrote:
Also, how rigid is causality? Does the motion and transformation of matter happen according to "iron" laws? I know consciousness is a dynamic factor that can certainly transform matter when applied, but prior to that is everything happening exactly as it must, is there any chaos or randomness in the universe? Like, did the Earth have to be created exactly as it was, did the universe have to unfold exactly as it did prior to that moment that primitive consciousnesses developed on this planet?Again, I suspect if we knew
all the causes, right down to the quantum level, there would be pretty rigid constraints on how the universe began and evolved.
Quantum physics is the joker in the deck, of course. "Down there", things seem pretty random and indeterminate. Idealists have great sport at the expense of materialists, gleefully pointing out that materialism ultimately rests on tiny particles that randomly appear and disappear in nanoseconds...the "quantum foam" at the base of the universe.
Modern "chaos theory" is also of interest here; there is apparently a kind of "order" in chaos...perhaps "weak causes" come in clusters.
Does this introduce an element of "real chance" into macro-events? Could a large country jump from feudalism to socialism or even communism without passing through capitalism...provided the "right people" were in "the right places" at "the right time"?
Are There "Laws" of History? June 9, 2003#nosmileys