Blackfish documentary on CNN - anyone else watch it?

[FireIceTalon]

If you follow the premise that the universe is a collection of particles that must follow prescribed laws and that everything in the universe is caused by the interaction of those atoms following those laws, then we ourselves are also just a collection of particles following those laws. While it would appear to us that we have free will, our very thought processes are just a by-product of the interactions and our free will is just an illusion.

As a Dialectical Materialist, I generally agree with this. We often hear the expression "mind over matter", but the way the world really works is the opposite - its "matter over mind". The physical must exist before consciousness itself can. The Hegelian Dialect formula was brilliant in that it was able to create a framework for understanding how change came about from interaction between two opposites - but his starting point was in the mind rather than the material world, and that is when Marx came and turned Hegel "right side up" by putting the dialectic at the starting point of Materialism instead of Idealism. Our ideas are merely the expression or interpretation of the material world we live in.

Individual free will is largely an illusion - it exists only in a trivial sense (for instance, one can choose to eat chocolate ice cream instead of vanilla - but one cannot just opt out of living under capitalism). All people in the world, even those with great power or social status, are constrained by the material forces and processes that the world dictates upon them. This is why religion has persisted for so long, because people use it as a way of trying to escape from harsh material realities of the world, and in doing so they construct an artificial world that ostensibly is a haven for them. Solipsism however, is hardly adequate (whether it is trying to escape the real world, or explain it) - there is no other world except the physical world we live in, no matter how creative or imaginative a place that one can muster up in their mind. This is also why Marx/Engels rejected the utopian socialists like Robert Owen, who were largely a product of the French Revolution in 1789. But humans can, at times, take matters into their own hands and alter the course of history, though even in revolutionary situations there are still constraints upon them, nor can any single individual do it.