The People's Line

The People's Line

What thermodynamics teaches us about free will

You don't have to be a determinist to recognize profound systematic limits to our political agency.

Carl Beijer's avatar
Carl Beijer
Feb 17, 2024
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Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

Marxists, historically, have often argued that human behavior is governed by deterministic laws of cause and effect rather than by free will. This was particularly the case in the early twentieth century, as I wrote a while back; but today one can make an even stronger case for this, particularly as our study of the human b…

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