Brain Candy posted:

the dice are there no matter how much bullshit about many worlds you want to put up: it is not possible to predict when a particular atom will decay, Heisenburg uncertainty is a real thing that the device with transistors you wrote your words with had to account for

the future is open! even if it's only you have no idea which possible universe you'll end up at. there is no correct interpretation of QM that gets you back to the dreary clockwork of Kant and Newton

Ferrinus posted:

i mean even if there's no way to predict it it just means you'll never know. it doesn't mean you've ever had any control over the outcome

StashAugustine posted:

tbh as it relates to Marxism this is kind of a pointless philosophical tangent. either way, from any practical perspective, it's clear that people make decisions influenced by their economic condition, society, and past experiences, but that these decisions are not 100% predictable especially on an individual level. Whether we're all clockwork automatons (whose inner workings we cam never actually predict) or have some divine spark of consciousness (that's subject to our past experiences) is basically irrelevant

Ferrinus posted:

"free will" or "god" or whatever are totally irrelevant to the question. what matters is such completely psychic phenomena as "capital". grind a factory down into dust and show me a single atom of capital. you can't do it. and yet, capital real, strong, and my enemy

The Voice of Labor posted:

If capitalism succeeds and there's no living being left with a brain capable of learning and understanding and being able to explain the concept of capital, capital will cease to exist. until the centipede people discover our books and our ruins and institute a parody of it for entertainment

Brain Candy posted:

it's important to reject that we're fully clockwork automatons, that history is not fully determined, because those leave no room for human agency. we can't be certain we aren't, but we can deny that we certainly are as merely a comfortable way to be okay with doing nothing

it's Pascal's wager in reverse, directed towards affirming the importance of life here and now: if we're determined, who cares, we'll only do what we'd always have done anyway. but if we're not, believing so is a waste of everything

The Voice of Labor posted:

If capitalism succeeds and there's no living being left with a brain capable of learning and understanding and being able to explain the concept of capital, capital will cease to exist. until the centipede people discover our books and our ruins and institute a parody of it for entertainment

Brain Candy posted:

the dice are there no matter how much bullshit about many worlds you want to put up: it is not possible to predict when a particular atom will decay, Heisenburg uncertainty is a real thing that the device with transistors you wrote your words with had to account for

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Won't the centipede people inevitably create their own version of capitalism?

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Won't the centipede people inevitably create their own version of capitalism?

Zodium posted:

tokin opposition posted:

communism is a vibe

The Voice of Labor posted:

you proved the most important point. statistical probability over millions and trillions of "dice rolls" is pretty much certainty. transistors can be designed to accommodate probability because it's regular and consistent. likewise, you're not constantly phasing in and out of physical objects because in so far your body doesn't consist of a few atoms, it consists of an enormous sum of atoms

you can't escape newton. not at a human scale

Brain Candy posted:

the dice are there no matter how much bullshit about many worlds you want to put up: it is not possible to predict when a particular atom will decay, Heisenburg uncertainty is a real thing that the device with transistors you wrote your words with had to account for

the future is open! even if it's only you have no idea which possible universe you'll end up at. there is no correct interpretation of QM that gets you back to the dreary clockwork of Kant and Newton

The Voice of Labor posted:

you proved the most important point. statistical probability over millions and trillions of "dice rolls" is pretty much certainty. transistors can be designed to accommodate probability because it's regular and consistent. likewise, you're not constantly phasing in and out of physical objects because in so far your body doesn't consist of a few atoms, it consists of an enormous sum of atoms

you can't escape newton. not at a human scale

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

the engineers who designed the transistors had to account for every possible quantum configuration they could reasonably expect the transistor to end up in.

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

I'm not really sure what you're getting at - other than your quibble over my reference to "dice bullshit" there's nothing in your post that appears to contradict what I was saying

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

wtf are you talking about? relative state formulation / many worlds / whatever doesn't "get you out" of any of those things, nor does it claim to, nor did I claim it did

neither does it deny determinism, in fact it affirms it. good grief

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

wtf are you talking about? relative state formulation / many worlds / whatever doesn't "get you out" of any of those things, nor does it claim to, nor did I claim it did

neither does it deny determinism, in fact it affirms it. good grief

Brain Candy posted:

oh jesus christ when are talking about physics and whether outcomes are predetermined, when someone says things are non-deterministic they do not mean non-caused

deterministic : non-random
non-deterministic: random

in other words, if you totally know the world state can you, even just in theory, work out the one and only future state

Brain Candy posted:

oh jesus christ when are talking about physics and whether outcomes are predetermined, when someone says things are non-deterministic they do not mean non-caused

deterministic : non-random
non-deterministic: random

in other words, if you totally know the world state can you, even just in theory, work out the one and only future state

AnimeIsTrash posted:

i'm more of a cumtown communist personally

Cpt_Obvious posted:

Look, you can't just calculate where a mortar round is gonna land based on trajectory and wind speed. It's made out of electrons!

Fish of hemp posted:

If everything is predetermined, then I can just sit on my rear end because communism is inevitable.

quote:

Marxism can be described as the first rigorously scientific vision of society. The fundamental law of Marxism holds that the life of human society is in the final analysis determined by the level of development of the productive forces.

Does this mean that Marxism is a philosophy of social determinism? Does Marxism hold that the existence and development of societies are determined absolutely, that they have no freedom? If the answer to this is yes, then it is misleading and deceptive to hold out the prospect of revolution, for in the final analysis it would be the determinism of the productive forces that counts.

The idea is hard to accept. For one thing, everyone can think of situations in which it is possible to make choices. The people of El Salvador are today faced with the choice between continuing to be governed by a reactionary regime or waging a struggle to overthrow that regime and establish democracy and perhaps even socialism, furthermore, we can think of many, many historical situations in which societies have made choices that have altered the course of events. Men can make plans for their individual and collective existence, just as they can make plans to transform nature and put it to work for them.

The history of humanity, especially in the last few decades, provides ample proof that men can use nature for specific purposes and transform it to a considerable extent to suit their needs. How is this possible? It is possible inasmuch, and only inasmuch, as they rely on the laws governing the “life” of nature to transform it. Man is now capable of sending a spaceship outside our solar system; he can do so only because he has learned and mastered many of the laws governing gravity, energy, the strength of various metals, electronics and communications, etc. In other words, men’s freedom to transform nature depends on how well they understand it.

This is basically the same reason Marx and Engels studied the life of human societies, and especially capitalist society. Through their research, they gained a certain understanding and vision of history. They concluded that human life in society was historically determined by the level of development of productive forces, that is by the gradual and progressive development of man’s capacity to ensure his subsistence by transforming nature. This means that the first law of human society is that a society is determined by the need to ensure its own subsistence. Everything it does is ultimately oriented towards satisfying this “fundamental determinism”. The way a given society goes about doing this, the organizational forms it develops to satisfy this basic requirement, are determined by the level of development of the productive forces. This is what Marx and Engels meant when they said that the relations of production are, in the final analysis, determined by the development of the productive forces.

This raises the question of the action of the working class, and more specifically the action of communists, in relation to the struggle for socialism today. Does it even make sense to talk about waging the struggle for socialism? Should we not just view socialism as the necessary and inevitable result of the development of the productive forces? Isn’t the struggle for socialism a delusion?

Unless I am very mistaken, no communist, no socialist – of any stripe – has ever said that the struggle for socialism is a delusion, a sham. No one has ever categorically suggested that socialism would inevitably result from the development of the productive forces alone. Nonetheless, there have been times in the history of the communist movement when positions were defended which in practice boiled down to making the future of socialism solely dependent on the development of the productive forces. It can certainly be argued – although it has not yet been proven rigorously – that this point of view became predominant in the international communist movement after World War II, and that it was already predominant in the Second International by World War I.

As a matter of fact, certain phrases written by Marx and Engels can easily be invoked in support of such a view of historical development. Marx said that there is a “necessary correspondance” between the relations of production (and thus the various historical forms into which society has been organized) and the level of development of the productive forces. From this, it is sometimes rather easy to slip into saying something else: that a given level of development of productive forces will necessarily coincide with an equally advanced set of relations of production.

Yet there is an enormous difference between the two statements. It is one thing to say that capitalism emerged in Western Europe in the wake of feudalism and commodity production, because of the level of development of the productive forces that had been attained in that part of the world. It is another, quite different thing to say that it was inevitable (necessary) that capitalism emerge in Western Europe as soon as the Middle Ages were over.

In other words, historical materialism enables us to understand to a certain extent – for we still have much to learn about this – some stages in the evolution of human societies; but it does not tell us that these stages were inevitable. Nor does it enable us to foretell the future. In short, historical materialism cannot be treated as a magic recipe for the sure-fired road to socialism. To try and do so would be to commit the mirror image of the same mistake that many have made in trying to understand past history, when they conclude that the “failures” of socialism are the result of a poor application of Marxism-Leninism.

The development of societies does not follow a predestined, predetermined course. Societies can act on and influence their development. But – and this is the fundamental lesson of Marxism – societies cannot act in ways that contradict the laws currently governing the evolution of societies. It is important to learn to understand these laws, because then we can intervene more effectively in the process of social change in the future and, above all, better serve the cause of socialism.

tokin opposition posted:

Yeah cool free will or whatever. What's the Marxist position on eating rear end