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February 28, 2005
When is a person truly free?
We had our first philosophy cafe at the Iron Rail Bookstore in the Marigny and considered the question whether we are truly free. A definition we came up with is that freedom is being or acting without constraint. A followup question is what counts as a constraint? An assailant or an enemy. Our own government. Our own desires. Our own ignorance. All options. Each of these options leads to interesting discussions.
Another option is that we are simply causally constrained. Like, if you consider that you are a natural organism, and that everything you are is dependent upon this natural organism which follows physical laws, then any action you perform is an event having some cause explicable by physical laws, so that the sense of choice you had in performing that action is perhaps illusory.
Another option is that values constrain freedom. The value of not killing determines your action away from murder. But in our conversation about values, there arose the paradox that in acting on values you may actually be considered to be in a freer state than if you, say, acted on mere desire or even chaotically or ambivalently.
Thinking about it after the philosophy cafe, I'd say I more fully experience freedom when I fully accept what is bound to happen. I see that it is going to happen and I say "great". This goes for both things done to me and things I do. What's odd is to be able to think that my own action is bound to happen and yet feel free in letting it happen. I'm thinking of experiences like playing a sport or a musical instrument that you're good at and being "in the zone". It's like what you're doing happens before it happens.
That seems to me the epitome of the experience of freedom and even if all my action is "constrained" by neural firings in my brain, if I could take a look in my brain and see that a particular firing were correlated with a particular effect which I'm happy to see will come about, then great! How liberating!
So, I don't think that a true sense of freedom comes from "being able to do otherwise" as it's often framed. This seems to me like a greedy sense of freedom, a sense of freedom which dooms itself. - Drew
Posted by lyceum at February 28, 2005 10:39 PM
Comments
i agree.
there is redundancy in the old saying "live in the moment".
we feel free paradoxically when we release our feelings about our relative places in time. when we dwell on our past self (i know i could have chosen differently) or on our future self (i will try to create this or that outcome), we are bound to a self that does not exist. when we act with good intention, and flow into outcome, there is the sensation of freedom.
Posted by: amy at May 16, 2005 09:24 AM
We are all free to the degree that we allow it.The chains that bind us and hold us among the shadows of the cave were created in our childhoods.We were fettered when we came to accept false beliefs about ourselves,our values and the nature of reality in general.We accept these beliefs,often unconsciously because as children we will do whatever it takes to be loved,accepted,noticed or in darker instances,to survive.Unfortunately,what helped us through our childhoods is an enormous and detrimental weight in adulthood.We carry those chains without understanding how they now serve to block us in the pursuit of our highest goals.However,we can gain an understanding of where we first accepted these false beliefs and why we accepted them.In understanding this we may release ourselves from those chains and make our way out of the cave to a true freedom.For all other freedom is nothing,if the soul is not free.
Posted by: Donna at August 16, 2005 11:11 AM