free will, determinism, and necessity...

[Peter Kropotkin]

we have, as human beings, at several times in our existence,
have discussed free will, determinism and necessity...
and I think part of the problem lies in the fact that we have not
really broken them down into their rightful order...

so, let us begin with free will.... free will to what exactly?
can we have free will to the biological and psychological necessities
of human existence? are we free to ignore the bodily needs like food,
water, shelter, health care, education, or even sleep? Nope... it is
obey them or die.. and we cannot disregard one of the basic
biological necessities, which has been implanted into us...all of us..
which is the drive/will to live... no matter what the cost is...
that can be described as a being determined... a biological necessity...

(even people who commit suicide, aren't really tying to kill themselves
as much as they are trying to end the pain of existence.. it is the pain
they are trying to escape, not life itself)

and the next step in our understanding of the differences between free will,
determinism and necessity.. is ''the laws of nature'' the law gravity for
example or the rules of thermodynamics...are we free to accept or reject
the ''laws of nature"... we do not have free will in terms of the various
''laws of nature''... for example, we cannot at our own discretion,
freely choose to obey or disobey the laws of gravity..
we have no free will in the matter of ''the laws of nature'' that of
gravity or evolution or thermodynamics... they are what they are,
regardless of how we feel about them... good, bad or indifferent....
we have no choice... and the ''laws of nature'' are a necessity/determined
for us.. there is no shortcut or work about in the nature of those laws..
they are, as far as we know, fixed and set... light travels 186,000 miles
per second... we have no control over that...that is fixed... and it is us
who must adapt to ''that law of nature'' there is no free will in the matter...
and this is important to note.. because according to ''the laws of nature''
we are fixed, set and must accept them no matter what.. we are determined
in our responses to ''the laws of nature'' there is no free will...

So, that is one area that is determined, and part of necessity...
as we are part of nature, we then must follow the rules of our
biological clocks... we are born, we live, we age, we suffer from
the illnesses of being human.. we have no choice.. we suffer from
necessities of existence.. growing old hurts, physically hurts..
and there is no free will in the matter.. why? because as part of
our determination, we are bound by evolution to the ''will to live''
part of every human beings basic existence is this ''will to live''
at all costs... every single human being has it.. I am old, and I,
every single day, is feeling the pain of growing old.. it hurts...
but because of my biological necessity of evolution, I don't kill
myself even though I know that pain of old age, will get worse,
and every single day, it does get worse....and this show us the clash
between the free will we have, to commit suicide or to follow
the necessity of the ''will to live''...

so, what exactly does this concept of free will cover?
it can't cover the biological necessities of the ''laws of nature''
or the physical necessities of existence like gravity or evolution..
or even our choice of the biological necessities of eating, sleeping,
water, shelter, of education... we have no free will in those matters....

so, where exactly does our free will become free will?
the concept of free will is tied into choice.. when we have a choice...
we have no choice in the matter of our biological or physical
necessities.. eating or gravity, for example....and we have no choice
in our psychological necessities.. like love.. or esteem or in the pursuit
of safety/security....our psychological necessities are just as important
as our biological necessities...having love makes life worth living..
being esteemed by our friends or colleagues.. that is vital for us
as human beings... for our psychological well being...
think of our miserable our lives are without love, or the esteem
of others, or not having safety/security...

do we have free will in regard to our psychological needs of
love or safety/security? I would say no.... love makes life worth
living.. it is really that simple... love makes all the pain of existence
worth living for... I can deal with the pain of growing older if I have
my wife, of 27 years with me...and she will, or so she has said, she
will be with me to the bitter end.. and that boys and girls, makes
the pain of existence worth it.. growing old alone.... I wouldn't wish
that on my worst enemy...

but we still haven't come to the free will aspect of existence....
where in my existence can I practice ''free will'' or make my own
choices? as I have to work shortly, I shall leave it here for now?

Kropotkin

[phyllo]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

[Peter Kropotkin]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

K: I will get this as soon as I can, but as time is short, and I have
another fish in the barrel to shoot...

But Kropotkin, what about ism's and ideologies?
Aren't we free to join an ism or not?
Perhaps, perhaps not... let us look at one ism of the modern age,
communism.... to be clear and this is important, communism is not
a political system.. it is an economic system and failure to understand
that means that you won't understand what Marx was all about......

Imagine yourself back in the 1840's and 1850's... what did Marx see in
England that drove him to work out communism?
the emptying out of the countryside and millions of people moving into
the cities.. and that happened everywhere in both Europe and in America....
(in America that didn't happened until after the Civil War of the 1860's)
and what did he see in these cites of immense growth?
Poverty of a scale not seen since ancient Rome.. Ghettos of millions of
people in a fairly small space.. and that was the problem facing Marx...
How to create a system that could overcome all this immense poverty..

Now socialism and communism had been in the air for decades before
Marx started writing...and this is another brick in the wall... for he wasn't
the first.. he was building on a line of thought that had been around for while....

for every single solution comes from a problem.. that a strong central
government was a solution to a problems in the Middle Ages... that of a divided
Government... anyone who looked could see the problems of the Middle Ages..
that of a weak and inefficient government being unable to hold or maintain control
of an ever increasing population.. the centuries after the Middle Ages were
ages where the Kings of Europe began and increased the control of the
population of Europe by creating strong, centralized governments....
while the entire time fighting the Catholic Church for control over the
population of Europe and beyond... the Church lost, for a wide variety
of reasons.. and by the time of Marx, it was obvious the church had lost...

and so did this mean to Marx? that his solution was a religious solution,
for he saw religion's as part of the problem, not part of the solution....
calling Religions as "The opiate of the masses'' .... for now he was left
with the political, governments as his best solutions for the problem he
saw... and that is why he went the way he did with his solutions....

and time is up.. I owe, I owe, off to work, I go...

Kropotkin

[Flannel Jesus]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

Would you want to?

[Iwannaplato]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

Would you want to?

Personally, I'm getting tired of pre-existing conditions. Not that I'm sure I'd like the alternative.

[phyllo]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

Would you want to?

Sure. I can see the advantages.

I have some belief that has a hold of me, in a way. If I was able to 'magically' drop it, then I could move on to something better.

[Flannel Jesus]

Obviously, you can't just will whatever you want.

But can you will anything free from preexisting conditions?

Would you want to?

Sure. I can see the advantages.

I have some belief that has a hold of me, in a way. If I was able to 'magically' drop it, then I could move on to something better.

Maybe you'll move onto something better, or maybe you'll forget that actually you don't like eating feces, and you'll stick your head in a toilet bowl of your own free will because you magically dropped the belief that feces is not good to eat.

[phyllo]

Maybe you'll move onto something better, or maybe you'll forget that actually you don't like eating feces, and you'll stick your head in a toilet bowl of your own free will because you magically dropped the belief that feces is not good to eat.

Back to high school.

I'm too old for that.

[Flannel Jesus]

Maybe you'll move onto something better, or maybe you'll forget that actually you don't like eating feces, and you'll stick your head in a toilet bowl of your own free will because you magically dropped the belief that feces is not good to eat.

Back to high school.

I'm too old for that.

High school sounded rough for you, my feces intake in highschool was pretty low.

[Flannel Jesus]

I'm a little concerned that you think my previous post was a joke. It wasn't. If free will is the ability for the universe to randomly rid you of some of your beliefs and preferences, then... there are some pretty terrible possible consequences to that, it seems to me. My feces example wasn't a joke, it was an example of a terrible consequence of removing random beliefs and preferences.

My desire to not eat shit is a pre existing condition, and one which I would not like to be free from.

[phyllo]

No longer participating in this thread.

[Belinda]

There is no such thing as absolute freedom,which is popularly called 'Free Will'
However some people are freer than others.
If you have correct information you will be more free than someone else who lacks correct information or who has been misinformed.
If you have been taught how to think for yourself you are are at less risk of becoming unfree.
If you have been taught life skills such as how to use your imagination and create ideas and artefacts you will be that much more free. Similarly if you have been taught how to manage relationships with other humans and animals and your environment as a whole then you will be more free than somebody who lacks these skills.

[Peter Kropotkin]

I often come back to this point... what is man/human beings?

part of what made the Greek civilization so, well, frankly great,
was they had a common understanding of what a man was...
a bipedal rational creature... was often the phrased used in
describing what a human being was... the Greeks thought that
the universe was a rational place which could be understood rationally....
today, we know better... one thing that the Greeks did much better
than we do, is trying to account for randomness and chance aspect of
existence... there gods were the reason for the existence of change,
chance and chaos......

and what of man, what is the human creature?
we have called human beings, Homo ergaster which means
beings that work... and being that worship.. Homo adoran..
or perhaps homo fictus.. fictional man.... or perhaps,
homo politicus,, beings that care about justice, common welfare,
and the sustainability of the natural basis of life...
homo oeconomicus... beings that in some economic theories as a rational
person who pursues wealth for their own self-interest...
we have a lot of theories that might explain the communality of
human beings...

and I offer up one more theory... beings that solve problems...
homo... no ideas what that might be called? anyway, that is one of the
basic and fundamental aspect of human existence...
and many here will just dismiss that before they even
consider it.. but it makes sense...

now the interesting thing is this... if problems can have different solutions,
that seems to suggest that there is no such thing as a universal solution to
our problems.. solutions that work for everyone, at all times... if our problems
are different than the Greeks problems, than we require different solutions...
and I suggest that every society/state/civilization had different problems
that needed to be solved...and thus needs different solutions...

and we can relate this into our modern world... thus, we can see
the polarization of Americans coming from the fact that those on
the left sees different problems than those on the right...
and different problems require different solutions.. and no solution
is universal, answering all problems with the same answer...
as the right tends to do.....

so, to seek an overall understanding of this problem... we look into
history and see something interesting.. we see that our isms, our
disciplines are solutions to a problem...our study of history is a solution
to a problem, math is a solution to a problem, philosophy is a solution
to a problem...ism's like capitalism and communism and Catholicism are
all solutions to a problem.. as is the idea of government itself..
government is a solution to a problem... and different problems
require different solutions... and this is a response to the question,
what is being human? we are beings seeking answers to questions,
and the only way to get those answers is through isms and ideologies,
and disciplines like math or history...

so, we can backtrack different solutions into the problem being faced...
thus, we can see the Eternal forms of Plato as being a solution to
the problem of the appearance of change in our field of vision...
One of the questions that the Greeks faced, what this question of
change.. and was change real or just a mask for something else?
the answer of we can only step into a river once, is an answer about
the idea of change in the universe... it is a solution to the problem
of change or is change not real, it just looks real.. but isn't...

but we have no sense of that problem.. we don't need an answer to
that because it isn't a problem today, as it was for the Greeks...
we moderns have different problems in which we seek solutions....

both communism and capitalism are solutions to a problem...
they are both economic systems and thus solutions to
economic problems...and democracies and monarchies are political
solutions to a political problem... and we have to understand the
difference between economic and political problems/solutions....

and so, we return to the original problem.. of free will, determinism
and necessity.... and how do we connect our problems/solutions into
context of free will? One of the things about communism, is the
very need to proclaim it as a solution to a problem...
and as something that is part of necessity... that the inherent fate
of capitalism is to become a ''worker state''.. that that is going to
happen regardless of what we do or say about it... becoming a ''worker state''
is going to be a necessity... we are told that it is inevitable ...
and something that is inevitable is not free will but is determinism..
we have no choice.. that is the future.. the coming ''worker state''....
and the word inevitable means we have no free will/choice in the matter....
let us take another ism and deep dive into it... capitalism....

even a cursory look at capitalism tells us that capitalism is not
about free will/choice, but about determinism... necessity....

we have two points in which we can see capitalism is not about free will..
the first point is in the very necessity of capitalism...for capitalism to
succeed, it must have, requires that the business exploits its workers....
forcing workers to create profits over what they pay the workers...
this profit exploitation is pretty clear...the entire goal of business is
to make profits... and to do so requires a business to pay workers less
money than they create... if I create $10 dollars in sandwiches, they
cannot pay me for th0at.. it doesn't create profits if they pay me the same
amount for my production... they must pay, have to out of necessity, to
pay me less for my efforts... thus, I might get $5 dollars for the $10
dollars of effort/production...this is the only way for capitalism to
succeed.. there is no other way.. this is necessity and within necessity
comes determinism... if there is no free will, no choice, there is only
determinism.. then the entire system of capitalism is anti-free choice...
and another brick in the wall is the fact that we cannot opt out of
capitalism as a system... we have no free will in working within capitalism...
we could say no, and starve to death while living on the streets.. that that
choice is no choice given that we are programed by evolution to
''stay alive'' at all costs.. the will to live is very, very strong in human beings...
and this leads to conflicts... to have free will in the matter of capitalism,
we must ignore our evolutionary programming of living out our lives at all
costs... living on the streets is a very dangerous way of living... which violates
our prime directive of continuing living at all costs...
necessity vs free will.. comes at a cost....

so, we have two such ism's that have, at their heart, this question
of free will vs determinism...

if something is necessary, it isn't free will... and if it is truly free will,
it isn't necessary..

to continue on my understanding of capitalism.. we hold that
capitalism is about choice, and choice is free will.. but is
capitalism really about free will? is free will really about which
deodorant we decide upon? or the other problem, among many,
is this question, that Marx even faced, was the question of monopolies....
as fewer and fewer businesses own more and more, and we see this
every single day.... check out how Kroger's want to buy out Albertsons
all the while pretending that it will give consumers greater choice,
a bald face lie if there ever was one... and that becoming bigger will
reduce the prices within stores, another bald face lie...

and this reduction of the marketplace is happening in every industry in
America...from cars, to cereals to the number of airlines to tire manufacturing...
every single industry has smaller and smaller number of businesses engaged in
that industry... look at two sectors... cereals... we have entire shelfs
of cereals.. but look closer and we see that there are only 4 manufacturers
of cereals in America today and those companies own 85% of all cereal sales
in America...we have Kellogg which has about 30% of the cereal business,
we have General Mills, which has about 30%, we have Post holdings which has
about 19% and we have private labels which is about 7%.. thus about 86%...
of all cereals in America is produced by just 4 companies...and that is typical
of products in America...

for example, the 95% of all Media in America is owned by 5 companies...
Comcast, The Walt Disney company, Warner Bros, Discovery and Paramount
Global...and this owning of the media is a world wide problem....
not just an America problem...and thus, where is our free choice, our
free will if 95% of all media is owned by just 5 companies.....

free will is driven by choice, and if we have no choice, we have
no free will.. it is as simple as that...

and in my posts, I have yet come across where the free will is in
our lives... I wonder where free will lies in America today?

Kropotkin

[FrankGSterleJr]

The FAA basically rubber stamps the giant Boeing corporation’s new planes, including its flawed 737 Max product (and who-knows-what before and after it).

The first 737 Max crash was Lion Air Flight 610 [October 29, 2018] and the second was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 [March 10, 2019], together horrifically killing all 346 people onboard.

Meanwhile, Transport Canada typically waits for the FAA's decision on whether it grounds the planes flown by American carriers — while Transport Canada still allows them to fly in Canada. ... WTF?!?!

It's still most concerning, especially when considering the disasters were quite preventable but happened essentially due to Boeing corporate profit maximization. ...

It seems the superfluous-wealth desires of the few, and especially the one, increasingly outweigh the life-necessity needs of the many. And our corporate news-media deems that reality ‘unfit to print’.

Perhaps the unlimited-profit objective/nature is somehow irresistible. It brings to mind the allegorical fox stung by the instinct-abiding scorpion while ferrying it across the river, leaving both to drown.

Corporate CEOs will shrug their shoulders and defensively say their job is to protect shareholders’ bottom-line interests. The shareholders, meanwhile, shrug their shoulders while defensively stating that they just collect the dividends and that the CEOs are the ones to make the moral and/or ethical decisions.

The more that corporations make, all the more they want — nay, need — to make next quarterly. It's never enough. Maximizing profits at the expense of those with so much less, or nothing, will likely always be a significant part of the nature of the big business beast.

Still, there must be a point at which that inhumane corporate practice can/will end up hurting big business’s own monetary interests. One can imagine that many living and healthy consumers are needed.

[Splittingcheese]

I just watched a video about an old man talking about automatic car keys that only work on your car and it got me thinking, "Yes, we are the ones who push the button when we want the car to unlock but it was already predetermined to work on only your car." So inasmuch as you control the key to your car, someone already programmed it that when you're ready you can use it to do whatever you want on your own car. You can think of this in line with the quote "man is free everywhere in chains."

We have the free will to go to where we've been predetermined (given the capacity) to go or we can freely choose to stay where we are.