Regardless of if it's practical to live that way in daily life, the world seems pretty determined. Everything happens because a vast amount of interactions between infinite factors causes it to. You can't really say you choose between things as many influences have been taken in by you and many things have affected your psychological state. Has everything been practically decided by the big bang? Now, this is not to say we can know everything or predict the future, but we know what's likely. Socialism or extinction may be inevitable, but we don't know yet. Socialism can only happen if people keep fighting, regardless. People will be convinced or principled or not. Science seems to agree with this, and only few, like the wrong Sartre would propose we have ultimate free will. So are there any arguments against determinism? I know there is a saying that you're freer when you recognize how your freedom is restricted, and that recognition may make your actions better, but isn't there ultimately no freedom?
To preface, I have no logical or syllogistic arguments against determinism. Many arguments are sophistic or simply ahistorical and undialectical.
Also, I take it that you're assuming "free-will = indeterminism" and "no free-will = determinism"? I'll roll with this for now.
Hard (Laplacian) determinism presupposes that you can fully predict the future once you know all the initial conditions. This means all events must necessarily have one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, granted we know the initial conditions and the functions to evolve it. Thus, "knowing what's likely" is, in my opinion, not convincing enough to believe in metaphysical determinism.
Notice the connection between knowledge and reality here:
The universe could be deterministic for all we know, but we cannot know all the initial conditions to evolve it deterministically for ourselves. Here, if we subscribe to some kind of technical limits to our knowledge acquisition, then we have "seemingly" random or stochastic processes, but governed by completely deterministic processes. Our physical theories have mathematical equations we can solve to connect cause and effects. Sounds too good and simple to be real? From the text I linked above:
So are our theories just incomplete? That there is a deterministic fabric but we are not clever enough to figure it out? If we can't figure that out then for all we know we do recognize a psychological free-will. One might retort that this free-will is an "illusion" (i.e. not real; doesn't exist in a metaphysical sense). I don't like this because I take phenomenology/experience to be first class, not mathematical equations, the latter is chauvinistic and reductive. The content of people's thoughts and decisions are meaningful to them. One's action could be interpreted by outsiders as both determined and completely unpredictable, depending on who you ask. If you psychoanalyze someone to "get down to the bottom" of their desires to explain how they are currently, then it functions as therapy, not necessarily something logically right or wrong.
If you say to your coworkers and fellow working class people that their lives are ultimately governed by mathematics and physics, then you either depress a potential comrade from future actions or set the ball rolling for their revolutionary escape (through negating what you've just said).
Either way, free-will in the sense of phenomenology versus free-will in the sense of indeterminism are really separate concepts in my eyes.
But then, by accepting the former free-will and being on the fence about the latter free-will, am I conceding that nature-in-itself is truly deterministic and that we're too dumb to figure it out?
To have a nature-in-itself being deterministic while everyone believes they have free-will, you might subscribe to the existence of a Kantian unknowable thing-in-itself. This, I presume, refers to the ultimate in what you mean by "ultimately no freedom". In other words, if this nature-in-itself is actually governed by deterministic principles, then we ultimately have no free-will.
But why do we have this assumption of determinism (and scientific reductionism; if we believe from the Big Bang, everything was determined)? Just because our 19th century mathematics and mechanistic physics worked out well then? Why is this determinism a fallback epistemological assumption? Are we just influenced by the way mathematical and physical sciences are taught in schools? That we can know these bits of proofs and derivations once we grasp these abstractions of nature taught by our teachers?
On the other hand, the universe might be infinitely complex and constantly changing. Let's take this assumption à la Engels: The ebbs and flows of our scientific development is a dialectical grapple with this dialectical nature. The dialetheistic structure of {abstraction}, {negation}, {concrete; production of new knowledge} is not a static method, but manifests itself in how we might choose to best move forward and develop new ways to understand the world.
This means not projecting our assumptions and dogma. Events that have no one-to-one connections between their cause and effect, but rather one-to-many, or many-to-many, are still caused, but they are indeterministic. Quantum physics can be interpreted to be completely indeterministic, but still caused. This is acceptable if one accepts the infinite nature of the universe that allows itself to be captured and abstracted by humans (inb4 occam's razor). We are to understand it at some certain levels and parts, but not the whole all at once. If we understand this, the "necessity" of one-to-one cause and effect seems like a dogmatic belief that only function to hinder further development. It can be a limiting case of certain physical theories (classical physics), but that is where it ends.
I agree with most of this. My view is that the universe is knowable, but not to a great extent as we are finite beings and everything is constantly changing and affecting other things. Thus, I don't think we should live as if the universe is simple and easily understood as in the hard (vulgar materialist) determinist view. As someone who hasn't read from the source, I think Spinoza's view of god and Jenner's view of nature (as described in Half Earth Socialism) are appealing.
On the topic of thoughts, It seems like the mind is a process that propels itself with influence from many things. It is largely out of one's (even subjective) control if control exists. The self and control are illusions somehow brought about by matter. I think this is about the buddhist view, if a bit more materialist. Just think about it, do you decide things or are you influenced by uncontrolled and contradictory desires? When you move do you decide those movements or is it mostly automatic? when you think are you actually directing your thoughts or do they simply arise spontaneously?
I agree. While we are finite individually, we can acknowledge the transgenerational flow of ideas and thus treat our knowledge-making enterprises as also constantly developing, so what is knowable can flexibly grow. For me there is little purpose in conjuring up a demon with perfect knowledge or complete systems of knowledge as that is very rigid and undialectical.
The following is rambling so feel free to ignore if it doesn't cohere, I need to do more thinking and reading about these related ideas to build up my understanding further.
spoiler
As for the second point, I take my experience and train of thought to be real. But it is simultaneously an "illusion" as what is left of my identity and decisions are a result of the sum of lived experience and interactions.
I think I do subscribe to an emergent mental faculty based upon material relations and contexts but this only restrict its form and does not take away its meaning at the emergence level.
Thermodynamics being macro level explanations for lower level statisical mechanics does not render the former meaningless. Its language game and concepts function at its own level, not out of convention but out of an epistemological need as we turn our attention from well-understood equilibrium ideal regimes to less well-understood real life nonequilibrium regimes.
Similarly, the free-will concept might have material grounds but its emergence level is what is experienced, of life events unfolding where one is the subject.
Once I grasp the self, "I", it ceases to be homogenous and monolothic, but rather becoming a mental explosion of colours and memories and constant reflections of these things. Everything in my past, I can reinterpret (relevant as someone who lived through traumatic events), and this is consciously done, as far it comes to me through active recollection to reframe my trauma and reclaim my youth.
Hence, I reinterpet the freedom of my will not as a moment of "choice". Life is not merely a series of choices for me personally, but a series of events interpreted and reinterpreted as actions and beliefs immersed in the context at the time. The context influenced me as much as I have interpreted the context to be as such. I am the subject understanding and unveiling my will through my past events as the object of analysis, with full "objective" context included. The concept of a choice as part of decision-making fades away.
Rather I act at any moment with some degree of awareness and through later reflection and metareflection interpret rational "will" from it. I cringe at weird things I did, but at those moments they were fully real and consciously intended. Through these reflections come negations of things I did, but which I don't want to do no longer. Thus, I elevate my understanding and have developed as a person.
That's where you might have said it's more of an observed process, rather than a conscious choice, made there and then. In this respect, I do admit that's how I have decided to interpret free-will, which is more empowering than a religious or scientific interpretation. I don't already believe in one-to-one causation in society, so my passage through time being caused by this or that is trivial as nothing I do exists in a vacuum. And I am simultaneously aware of my influences and also that I can be influenced by things I might not grasp through a deeper reinterpretation until many moments (or years) later. The mind at any moment in time is dragged by the flow of time and the material forces pressuring it to keep going, forcing it to move along. Certain things take a long time to be understood well. For this reason, I reject the strong notion of free-will that needs conscious choice at every minor crossroad in life, however these words and definitions might look like in vacuo.
Deconstructing this strong notion free-will will show that it is not a closed concept, ready to be embraced or desired: we need to understand personal ability (this goes hand in hand with philosophy of illness), personal identity, personal responsibility, etc. Come up with rigid, static frameworks for each of the above and you've lost the sense of my experience as a human who felt I have steered my life in certain ways, but also have allowed myself to be steered in other ways.
My rambling is not intended for self-validation that I somehow possess a made up free-will; in a revolutionary context I need to want to constantly look after my actions and reinterpret it so that my desire for a better world is not in full cognitive dissonance with my own current state of affairs. It makes sense in my head to want to navigate life as a subject wanting to project myself forward through interpretation of possibilities (either after or before said action) and as an object of nature; as the totalities of things around me and as a physical embodiment in sociocultural contexts. I find there is a balance to be achieved, or made aware of.
From David Bohm in Chance and Causality
There's plenty of space to reinterpret free-will (or concretized moments of free-will recognized or experienced by humans, if you'd like) into this representation of nature as wholly infinite and constantly developing.
If you scrap the indeterminism = free-will assumption, you can interpret this way: