It is funny, though unfortunately pretty inline with Mao’s cultural reception, where the Little Red Book was basically a pocket bible.

I don’t think there’s any interpretation of quantum physics that allows for it to be clockwork, but I think it’s a big leap from non-deterministic quantum phenomena to anything that could meaningfully be called free will.

Take a great hitter in baseball and try to determine what makes them so great at deciding when to swing. We try to see, right up until the moment when the batter commits to a swing, whether we can predict their actions in advance.

Some pitches, anyone could tell you not to swing at. Some, anyone could tell you to swing at. So the greatness lies in-between. Say for the sake of argument that it’s 1/3rd, 1/3rd, 1/3rd.

Then we have other great hitters, coaches, physiologists, etc. analyze the pitches instead, more confidently classifying them as swing or don’t, narrowing the band where the great hitter had a difficult choice to make, bringing us to 40%/40%/20%.

Then we outfit the player with all sorts of monitoring devices and watch the pitches in super slo-mo, revealing that on what had been previously considered too close to call, by the time it became apparent that the pitch was going to break, the batter’s muscles were tensed up in such a way that trying to adjust would have resulted in a ground-out to first. 45%/45%/10%

We install a theoretical non- brain implant to pick apart that mythical 10% and reduce it to 1%; the other 99% of the time, the batter is effectively acting as a complex machine.

At some point, though, we reach a pitch that really could have gone either way no matter how good our measurements were; a pitch that came down to a quantum roll of the dice. Is this the decision? Made by what? Subatomic particles that the batter had for lunch a while back? Does food get a welcoming party in the gut, where it’s informed that it’s now part of a baseball player and to be sure to take the fork in the wavefunction collapse that leads to more homeruns?

So yeah, when you look at it too closely, the idea that there’s an “I” who deserves credit for all “I”'ve done kinda falls apart and can’t be salvaged at the quantum level, either. Still, it’s a powerful illusion that we all basically buy into all of the time that we’re not thinking about it or taking hallucinogens, so I’m going back to it now.

Nothing is pre-determined per se. Everything is a product of the myriad factors and interactions of matter in the universe. The world is absurd I don’t believe in a plan or fate. My point is that free will does not exist in any form except as a perception of the spontaneous workings of our brains. I don’t think too hard about how everything that happens is inevitable, but that is the logical conclusion. I don’t think too hard about it because the world’s too complicated to predict with precision and that’s the beauty of it. Scientific socialism is the most accurate worldview for understanding how the world works closest to the truth.

That sounds highly unlikely, but maybe possible? It doesn’t validate free will, but it’s hard to come up with a good definition. The problem is secular “free will” believers will object to it being like a soul, which is the easiest way to describe it.

So you’re debating 19th century German philosophers on behalf of a 19th century german philosopher. All I mean by determinism is that free will doesn’t exist.

A rigid subscription to determinism and a rejection of free will implies a poverty of action and a resignation. Anyone can feel free to adopt that, just don’t call it compatible with dialectical materialism or Marxist thought more generally.

There are different kinds of determinism that get called materialist, and my argument hinges on separating them. As an example, there is economic determinism (here is someone arguing Marx is not that), which though metaphysically materialist is idealist in the Marxist sense of relying on abstraction that rejects some aspects of causality in the material world. In The German Ideology, for example, he refers to Hegelians as idealist in this special sense because they considered only, to put it crassly, their intellectual circlejerking over Consciousness and so on as though all of humanity was causally downstream from this when that is plainly not the case. Likewise, though it appears more materialist than whatever the Hegelians were doing, economic determinism is still discounting the causality of non-economic factors in the world and therefore meets this particular definition of idealist. Among these non-economic factors, of course, are things like the person’s own psychology, or those aspects which cannot be credited to their economic position (we can start with their perception of space if it must be proved that such aspects exist).

So what I’m complaining about are determinist framings that claim the idea of materialism while discounting factors that exist within material reality. Whether you choose to act or not is itself a material factor, and the fact that Laplace’s Demon could have predicted it is beside the point. There is no overarching I-Swear-This-Is-Materialist-Guys Destiny that operates independently from your choices, those choices are part of the causal chain as they are both caused and causing. Anyone who uses a phrase like OP of “free will is an illusion” is surely deluding themselves into quietism with a belief in some kind of destiny that is absolutely at odds with sincere materialism. Such people are just renaming Fate to Science and misappropriating scientific anecdotes and rhetoric to clumsily defend this sleight-of-hand.

OP has rejected free will and appealed to a materialist determinism, citing science. This is not exactly a compatibilist framing lol.

OP is being silly, but my point is that a compatibilist framing is one that endorses the idea of free will as an element of a nonetheless-deterministic system, which I think is the only way one can do Marxism coherently. Then again, I suppose this position comes from the fact that I think you need compatibilism to do anything coherently, so this isn’t nearly as focused an argument as I thought it was (and I didn’t think it was very focused to begin with).

I’m not invested in the philosophical debate itself because it’s pretty clear basically nobody actually reads 19th century German philosophy, and rarely carefully,

In my defense, I do read Schopenhauer sometimes, but what you really mean I assume are the more popular authors like the Hegelians and so on. I do make some effort to read Engels carefully, but he has the merit of not being as interested in Hegel as Marx.

OP is clearly referring to determinism in a materialist sense and one that leads to a poverty of action.W

Where did I imply this, allow me to quote myself on my previous post.

in recognizing determinism one can resign themselves to the supposed inevitable - that would be stupid, or one could go on living as if they had free will even though it’s probably determined or at least random. Remember that even if it is determined your determined actions still matter. Being convinced whether or not you have free will may be out of your control, but the following actions will still affect the world.

There’s my dialectics.

I know what Marxism is and I know people affect society. I just don’t know where you think free will comes from. At this point it just seems like you’re mad I used the word “determinism.” I’ll have you know Breht is not a hot takes kind of guy except when he shows his raw emotions around palestine. He is a nuanced dialectician and the podcast where he mentioned determinism wasn’t meant to be widely seen or make anyone mad.

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You and EB have a similar compatibilist viewpoint. I am skeptical of compatibilism because I have yet to hear a coherent argument for any sort free will that is not agnostic. I never said it was disproved by science, just that I can find no scientific arguments for it. Maybe I should check out Dennet.

How? I am no mechanical materialist, I just didn’t realize I need to write an essay on dialectics to show such. Believing in “free” will is a rejection of diamat because it implies an entity beyond material reality with the power to control one’s body.

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