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Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
Interesting subject.
I’ve heard Dennett speak about this and I’m still not sure I fully understand his position, but isn’t it just a version of the classical materialist ‘agency’-centered definition of free will?
Free will represents the material, social or other bounds of behavior that inhibit the execution of the brain’s probabilistic output. If I generate an LLM output and then reply ‘sorry, that’s not what I want, you need to give me another answer’, this is the digital equivalent of trying to exercise my free will to break into the White House and being stopped by the police. This isn’t a new conception of what freedom means, it’s the classical conception of liberty. The more ‘liberal’ (ie ‘free’) we are, the fewer restrictions we impose on biologically willed behavior. Sometimes these are political/social, sometimes these are raw material realities, like someone in a wheelchair being unable to exercise their desire to stand up and walk. Free will is the ability to execute the output of our language model in the material world. The initial output itself (desire) is unaffected. (This is obvious when we bring up, say, why we don’t have the ‘free will’ to fly like a bird; we are bounded by material reality; free will is execution, not thought.)
There are a huge number of mysteries still in the universe, including forces and existences likely beyond our comprehension. But I am confident they all exist within some kind of material reality, even if it is one we don’t (and possibly can’t) understand. The materialist conception doesn’t even necessarily prohibit some kind of spiritual existence, a soul of some form, a God, an all-loving, all-knowing being beyond and above us (the simulation hypothesis, which would allow for such a God, can be framed in materialist terms). It doesn’t prohibit heaven or reincarnation (all possible with sufficiently advanced technology/magic). It just says that if they’re real they’re going to be systems, they’re going to function in a predictable way, they’re going to be based on laws of the universe whether we understand them yet or not. It is unclear to me why even some form of Mahayana Buddhism, for example, would be incompatible with classical materialism in this context.
You make some good points here, although I still fail to grasp the idea of materialistic free will.
I think that even in rarefied philosophy circles, materialism is used constantly as a motte and Bailey. The Motte is the claim you’re making, that materialists just want to find laws and systems et cetera to explain phenomena. Which yes is an extremely defensible position, but on the other hand prescribes or denies basically nothing as you readily admit.
However, the Bailey of materialism is that God, ghosts, big foot, aliens, or whatever supernatural force or being can’t possibly exist because we know stupid bullshit like that doesn’t fit under our materialist understanding of the world.
I suppose a more accurate term could be something like reductive materialism or mechanistic materialism but eh I think people get the point. Thanks for clarifying.
There's nothing to grasp. Materialistic free will, AKA soft determinism, is an extremely convoluted and complex (and ultimately sophistic) web of reasoning created by very intelligent people who found the (obvious) conclusions of hard determinism to be repugnant, and so use their brainpower to maneuver around it as best as they can. They do this mostly by fiddling with definitions until they have bamboozled themselves into believing that they have proved something. Once you have accepted determinism, free will cannot exist, not in the way one usually thinks of it. The only way you can get around the free will problem is to:
Reject determinism - I have never seen anyone do that successfully.
Posit the existence of a soul which is outside the currently understood laws of the universe - and there are too many commonsense objections to this that I cannot resolve.
Soft materialism is in a category of beliefs that I have labelled as 'so absurd only the very clever could convince themselves to believe it'
I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history, but rather refer to much more mundane limitations in the material world on individual human will.
The animal whose desired path is blocked before them has no free will. The animal whose desired path is unblocked has free will. This is an entirely workable and normal conception of what ‘free’ means. Cf “you are free to go”, cf the constitution etc etc.
Can you execute a given desire? If you can, then in that instance you have free will for that task. No complex argument around determinism or the process by which you came to your desire is necessary.
What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?
It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.
And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.
This is a really interesting question. Is determinism falsifiable? that kind of feels like asking if trigonometry is falsifiable. Determinism is more theorem than theory, an exercise in hard logic rather than empirical data gathering. I think almost everyone would agree that the universe moves according to causality; that A leads to B leads to C, in a reliable, repeatable, (one might say deterministic) way. Determinism is merely the philosophy that you can extend that thinking from 'every part of the universe excepting the human brain' to 'every part of the universe'. In a dead universe, we would all be determinists.
I mean, what does the null hypothesis for determinism even look like? That causality is not true? That today we might mix 8 grams of oxygen and 1 gram of hydrogen and receive 9 grams of water, but tomorrow we might receive 15 grams? or that yesterday's water might spontaneously dissociate back into hydrogen and oxygen? Or perhaps into neon and feathers? Empiricism, the entire scientific method, is based on the truth of causality. If causality is false we have to throw pretty much everything out and just accept that we're all living in Plato's cave.
Or perhaps the null hypothesis is that causality is true everywhere... except the human brain. Not much of a null hypothesis, is it? Really feels like, if that's your theory, then determinism ought to be your null hypothesis.
Materialists generally claim that their viewpoint is simply the default, that there's zero evidence for anything non-Materialistic, and so they simply follow where the evidence leads.
Determinism is adopted because non-deterministic free will would pretty clearly break Materialism.
The problem is that there is precisely zero actual evidence for determinism itself, and there is an absolutely staggering amount of evidence for non-deterministic free will.
Every human has an entire lifetime's experience of making choices freely. No one has ever demonstrated actual deterministic control over the human will, in any way, to any degree, ever, despite repeated claims that such control was trivial and extremely-well-resourced and -motivated efforts to implement or demonstrate such control.
Despite this, Materialists routinely reject all evidence of free will on the basis of a determinism-of-the-gaps, having retreated from "we can directly, repeatably and arbitrarily engineer human will to our preferences" to "whatever you do was what you were always going to do, even if we can't predict it or control it or test this claim in any way". Determinism has been tested, and has failed all tests. After decades of steady retreat, the current version makes no testable predictions at all, but is precisely a statement of blind faith.
Observable free will is significant evidence that Materialism is wrong. But no human belief arises deterministically, and every human belief is chosen through an act of the will. Materialists choose to adopt Materialism as an axiom; evidence of free will conflicts with that axiom, and so it is discarded, not because it is disproven, but because weighting and filtering evidence is the purpose of axioms. Materialists know that free will can't exist, because if it existed it would disprove Materialism, and their adherence to Materialism is pre-evidential.
...And all the above is not an error to be corrected on the part of the Materialists, but rather a demonstration of how human reason actually operates. All beliefs are chosen. No one has ever or will ever be "forced" to adopt a belief, by evidence or by coercion or by any other mechanism. Some beliefs require more maintenance and effort than others, and some beliefs pay off more than others, but it all comes down to choice.
That we do not have access to a complete understanding of reality, and that the unknown unknowns are significant and must be accounted for.
Empiricism and the entire scientific method are not universal solvents. They have limits, and those limits should be understood and respected, not papered over, ignored or lied about. The later solutions have caused great harm and misery, and that harm and misery has never been adequately answered for.
Why? Within its limits, science and causality work quite well. Engineering is delightful. But my appreciation of air conditioning and microcircuitry and repeating firearms does not obligate me to ignore significant evidence that free will exists. I am comfortable saying that inert matter seems to run on strict causality, while the human mind does not appear to do so. This costs me nothing, requires me to paper over nothing, offered significant predictive value back when Determinism was still making falsifiable predictions, and seems to me to offer decent predictive value on the currently-untestable predictions that Determinism still allows itself.
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I mean, its oppositional, but I don't think it's unfair. When you follow determinism to it's logical conclusion you come to realize that everything that an animal or human does is a product of their brain structure, their surroundings, their sensory inputs, etc. Essentially, the human brain is a computer, and like all computers (all physical things, really.) it is deterministic. So, you declare "there is no free will! everything is predetermined, even my very thoughts!" And you are correct.
But then, along comes a soft determinist to say "Aha! but if we redefine free will in such a way that it instead represents the preferences of one of these deterministic machines and it's ability to have agency in this universe then free will does exist!" Well okay, yeah, I suppose, but all this really is is sleight of hand. You've twisted the concept of 'free will' until it no longer represents what it did before you learned of determinism. I accept the logic, I don't accept that you've demonstrated anything profound. Under this paradigm, a computer that wants to contact a server, and succeeds, has free will. But we don't think of smartphones as having free will, for obvious reasons.
Is it, in fact, a redefinition at all? It seems to me that ‘free will’ is really about the output space for whatever computation our minds do, whether that happens on a material or spiritual level. Anti-soft-materialism arguments struggle to explain what ‘classical’ free will that excludes it is supposed to be.
Meanwhile, it is possible to suggest at the (largely semantic, of course) difference between ‘hard determinism’ and the ‘soft materialist’ positions. Consider a criminal enterprise. Someone gets arrested, volunteers everything to the cops, gets released on bail, his co-conspirators say “what the fuck man, you have free will bro, why did you tell them that?”. The point being made isn’t a complex analysis of the internal process in the mind that occurs during reasoning, it’s a straightforward exhortation that this agent was not being externally forced to do something that it did anyway. It’s clear that it refers to a way of discussing the bounds of our behavior in a material reality, not an immaterial spiritual concept, which is why we don’t talk about having “free will” to regrow a leg or jump to the moon.
Defining free will as something that happens at the intersection of deterministic machines with good but imperfect predictive ability, material reality, and the forward passage of time fits with the way the term is generally used.
I think it is a redefinition. What you are describing is something most people would call 'freedom of action', or possibly just 'freedom' - the ability of an agent to do what it wants to without external interference. But under this definition, we could say that a Roomba has free will - because it can do what it wants (clean floors), but a prisoner does not, because he is unable to do what he wants (leave prison). This is very much at odds with how most people would use the term.
I agree that agents can make decisions to perform actions to alter the world. What I don't agree is that an agent - any agent - had the capability to make a decision other than the one that it ended up making. This is what most people would mean when they talk about free will - it's the idea that your snitch could have decided not to tattle, which is something that determinism rejects. the choice to snitch appeared unforced, but it was in fact as deterministic as was my Roomba's 'choice' to hoover my floors every day at ten o'clock.
I think i know what you're getting at here, but for the avoidance of doubt, determinism denies the possibility of spiritual decision making. The deterministic argument is:
In such a universe, “free will” more properly means the ability to consider multiple courses of action, and to reject any given potential choice based on conscious reasons, such as moral principles. In practice, our human wills are constrained by unconscious (“subconscious”) reasons, and not perfectly free.
FYI, I’ve had great success consciously removing unwanted reasons from my unconscious using Fourth Step tools from the Twelve-Step recovery method. I feel more free now than ever before.
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