Reply To: Good News: And No Religion, Too
“Alex says this is an illusion (because everything that happens anywhere in the universe at one moment is determined by everything that happened before right back to the Big Bang). Maybe it is in that unhelpful sense (unhelpful because it doesn’t explain anything). Or maybe “free will” is the (unhelpful) name given to that illusion?”
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That’s what David Hume said wasn’t it? – that “The cause must be prior to the effect.” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739). It’s called mechanical determinism – or hard determinism. Everything is reducible to the order(s) of reality below it and ultimately, I guess, to the level of subatomic particles. Causation is strictly a one-way flow – from the “lowest” (or earliest) to the “highest” order we know of being conscious existence.
The opposite of the hard determinist perspective in relation to the free will question is the indeterminist perspective held by people like Sartre. This asserts the absolute reality of free will. We are absolutely free to choose what we wish which is obviously bunkum. Our choices are evidently conditioned by what is possible
There is however an intermediate perspective called “soft determinism” which seems to me to be the most plausible one and gets around the problems one encounters with an essentially “physicalist” explanation of reality provided by the hard determinists who completely deny the possibility of free will altogether. This soft determinist position is represented by “emergence theory”. This basically holds that a higher order of reality “supervenes” or depends on a lower order but is NOT reducible to that lower order. Non-reducibility is demonstrated by the fact that the higher order can exert “downward causation” on the lower order. For example, mental states can affect brain states and are not simply “determined” by the latter. There is a two-way interaction.
I’ve never really understood why some comrades appear to adopt what seems to be a hard-determinist position. It’s a position that came to the fore with the emergence of mechanical philosophy in the 17th century and, as it happens, lent support to the social contract theories of people like Thomas Hobbes around that time.
Hobbes was a leading exponent of individualist ideology. He posited the idea that human beings once lived in a “state of nature” when existence was (supposedly) nasty brutish and short. These pre-social beings then decided to come together and set up a human society. Hence the idea of a “social contract”. Of course, the whole argument is completely nonsensical but it does conform exactly to the strict one-way flow of causation upheld by the hard determinist model. Empirical individuals had to have preceded social formations according to the logic of that model.
This is surely contrary to everything that a Marxian theory of the individual upholds. According to this, individuals are socially produced. In saying they are socially produced we are acknowledging the possibility of downward causation – from the level of society to the level of the individual. Language itself is a social product, symbolic interactions between individuals only being possible on the basis of shared meanings. A so-called “social contract” could never have occurred between pre-social individuals who lacked the means of communicating their intentions to each other.
If we accept in principle the possibility of downward causation then this refutes the claims of hard determinism but without, at the same time, lapsing into the idealism of indeterminism. Even in a “hard science” like Physics the mechanistic model of the universe has long been discarded before and since Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was formulated back in 1927. We can add to the list of counter-examples such developments as the “observer effect”, the “butterfly effect”, and “entanglement theory” which paint a picture of physical reality that is altogether more complex and mysterious than a hard-nosed deterministic cum mechanical model of the universe would suggest.
If that is true of the physical sciences how much more true would it be of the social sciences which is, after all, our terrain – the terrain of SOCIALists
