I remember near the end of Solaris the main character discussing that the only God he would believe in should have been an entity totally unlinked to anything else.

How does this relate to the question in the title?

Well, first of all we could try to define freedom.
First of all it's something you can only speak about by it's relationship to something else. A life of Freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom itself is inherently abstract.
Second, it's boolean, when someone is specific enough. Suppose there are two topics, A and B, and they are the only topics in the domain of speech. There's Freedom of A, but not of B. This doesn't mean Freedom of speech lies in some weird gray area. It just simple mean there is Freedom of talking about A, but there's not Freedom of talking about B.
A good definition of a free act is "an act that is not confined or moved by other acts".
Freedom, regarding the human condition, could thus be seen as the possibility of an individual to act freely.


But I think this is never the case.
Think of a regular person: how many duties does he/she have, due to his job, his family?
Now think of some unusual person, and outcast such as Diogenes of Sinope: he's free from the previous, he could have even intellectually escaped the coupling instinct, but he's still confined by the limitations of his body. If he gets too starved, he doesn't have the freedom to choose to stay alive.boolean
And now, try to suppose a human with no instinct, no physical need, due to some kind of hypothetical sci-fi genetic manipulation or something like that. What about his actions? Would they be free? What's a choice?
He would still be influenced by his culture. And even by rejecting culture, he would still have just defined a new domain of action, but which arises from the rejection of the previous, and as such can't be seen as something "on its own".

And now you should understand the reference from the beginning.

Would like to hear your opinions.

We give up our freedoms all the time. We are constantly influenced by our culture to give up our already limited freedoms. The word freedom is nothin but a word. Feeling free is subjective. A man sitting in prison for the rest of his life can feel more free than the millionaire trying to make more millions. Freedom is all in your head.

In your head... so do the choices we make in this life actually come from freewill? That question is worth pondering for sure. I read a book by Sam Harris called 'Freewill', I highly recommend you give it a read given the topic here. Mr. Harris explains this topic much better than I ever could. I wish I had more to say on the topic but it is so vast. It's like talking about god or religion or politics. It just goes on and on. As interesting as it is to think about it can be exhausting trying to find the answers to everything.

For me, I just do my best to be aware of the influences that surround me in my life, be it culture, friends, family, work and everything else around me that pulls me, and make my own decisions based off of my prior experiences. You take your freedom when you realize you have nothing to lose. By nature we are free beings. By nature we want to run free. We want to commune with nature itself. We are nature. Nature is free and has nothing to lose. That's how I see it.

Below is a talk from Sam Harris on free will, but please still check out the book.

You could define freedom any way you want to. But freedom seen in a very boolean, black or white kind of thing doesn't realy make any sense because you innevitably run into the contradictions mentioned.

But does that mean that the whole idea of freedom doesn't make sense?

I don't think so.
I think you should define freedom as the kind of space we have, GIVEN a certain amount of limitations, like our own nature.

Ofcourse we can't escape from what we essentially are. But without that, the word freedom would be void of meaning, in my opinion.

You can catch primitive animals by using bait. The animal wants the bait, but he wants it so much that it won't let go, once he has it.
So these primitive animals realy lack something, that higher animals like chimpansee's do posses. So in that sense, freedom is a gradual thing. Chimpansee's have more of it than mais or fly's.

Whitout desires, why would you even want to be free? There's no need for it, because there's no need for anything then. But we are passionate animals. So yes, we are limited by our passions, as passions are limited: we don't just want anything, we want something.

But we are free to question our passions. To delay gratification. We can let go of the 'bait', if we realy want to.

The whole point is: we experience freedom. The experience exists. Maybe (probably), it's all a completely pre-determined series of neural processes that causes the experience, but that doesn't make the experience itself any less real.

This counscious experience though, predetermined as it may be, has a vital role in the choices we make.

Experiments have shown that humans DO realy act differntly if they're told that free-will is an illusion. They are less inclined to restrict themselves, to let go of the bait, if you will.

So the experience of free-will realy does create a certain sort of freedom. The experience realy does affect the outcome of the proces. When we experience that we are free, we gain freedom.
The experience of free-will opens a world of possibility's that didn't exist before.

What does it matter that there is a neural correlate to the experience? It is the experience itself that matters.

This is very much how I think about it too.

Do we accept the teaching that we are not in control? And if we do accept that, do we give up the subjective belief of freedom? Or only then are we truly free?

I know personally I have created many ties for myself in this world. I chose life, I chose a family, I chose a career, I chose many things that create implicit needs to support these things I have chosen. That doesn't mean I'm not free to walk away at any given moment, or even to just quite simply stop caring.

It would be unconscionable and morally corrupt for me to let down my teachers and students in that manner. But that doesn't mean I'm not free to do so. It means I choose what I have, I choose my ties and my obligations. I recommit again and again. It's my choice.

Those choices are limited by my physical reality. But that reality does not dictate me, quite the contrary. I am extremely privileged. And thankful.

One day I may run out of teachers and students, I may run out of reason to participate in any greater context than feeding and cleaning myself. Perhaps then I will just go and sit on the mountain.

But I will be just as free in that moment as I am right now.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Speaking of freedom..i likethis song

Krishnamurti said freedom is precisely the state of not having to choose.

I heard Alan Watts once say that choosing is nothing more than a hesitation. To be free one must lead a choice-less life, that is to say that you act immediately and offer no hesitation in the actions of your life. Choice is not a form of freedom essentially, in fact it is quite the opposite.

Can we act immediately and without hesitation in all of our decisions in life? If we hesitate for even a moment the freedom is gone. This kind of thinking is new to me in many ways. I found it hard to wrap my head around this concept of leading a choice-less life, but now it makes a lot of sense to me. It's a surrender to your life. Going with the flow and not swimming upstream, just allowing the river to take you.

The same could be said for psychedelic states. When the experience is just allowed to be, it is an amazing and wonderful experience. When hesitation comes in, then it can become difficult. The freedom is letting go. Letting go and not making choices. Just allowing it to be what it is. It applies to every aspect of who we are as a human race. It applies to all forms of life I would think. This is the freedom. This is true freedom in my mind.

The plants and trees don't choose to grow. The lion doesn't choose to eat the gazelle. The squirrel doesn't choose to get up in the morning to forage for food. Why are we any different? Because we can choose.... and in that very instant, we loose our freedom from our true nature.

This is just my way of trying to express what freedom mean to me personally. This is something I am learning in my life. I apply this choice-less philosophy where I can but still struggle. It is not easy to just let go. I am learning slowly but surely. I see the times in all my experiences of life where I had the courage to just let go and those are the moments in my life when I felt the most free.

Nice to get that out actually. Sometimes my mind just doesn't understand until I write it. It's like I'm trying to teach myself when I post here on the nexus. So yeah... learning and doing my best to apply all of this to my life more and more. Patience. One day it will just be there, in an instant, and I will wonder why all the struggle. lol Fingers crossed anyhow...

I guess my question would be "Is choice an illusion?".

Have a great day everyone!

Is choice an illusion?

I think that if a certain act would lower the entropy within either yourself, or the (social) system that you're part of, the act must have been a choice.

How so? Can you elaborate please?

How would we have a job, family or even breakfast without choice? How would these people come to say these things without choice?

To act immediately without hesitation seems reckless and irresponsible. I think as mature souls we need to consider how our choices effect those around us, our environment, if not ourselves. We are a part of all, everything we do is a choice... even if we don't think about it consciously.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding what these people meant by choice, but I get the feeling they may be partially lost in void. Or possibly even disassociated from society. That is a choice too.

As to whether choice is an illusion, that goes back to whether or not reality is an illusion. Does it not? The answer that I came up with for that is that... For me, for all intensive purposes, it doesn't really matter.

We have other capabilities that should receive more merit like intuition, going with your gut, taking risks etc... Intuition is a vital part of how we make many of the decisions in our lives anyway. If we relied on our gut a little more, we would find we kind of fall into our lives to a certain extent. The mind cannot and will never wraps itself around intuition, going with your gut, it will never understand the heart.

This line of thinking is not to discount important decisions in our lives. Just letting your life unfold in reckless abandon is just foolish. We have to plan and make choices. But when your choices become easier and easier as you flow with your life you become free is what I am trying to say. The choices become less cumbersome and lighter. You can't rely on intuition in every instance but you can be aware of intuition's influence in your life.

Well, i think that the human being often seems to defy the laws of nature. Humans can do odd things like quitting heroin addictions, growing food, launching missiles. Things that take effort.

In most cases, when some act is quite destructive, there is no real choice behind it. It's just a habit or instinct that's being pursued. Like not doing anything about climate change, launching missiles to destroy other people, or not quitting heroïn.

And in most cases when an act is constructive, it's done with conviction. Like changing a habit that turns out to be destructive in the case of heroin addiction or climate change, or launching missiles for space exploration. Doing something new, reaching others a helping hand without expecting anything in return.

A robot wouldn't do these things. Unless it was being programmed to do so, in wich case it would either have been the programmers choice, or it would have been designed to realy be able to make big decissions.

When you drop something when it's hot it happens in an instant. These choices may seem like they are a great effort and that is what I am getting at. We are not in balance and struggle with making the choices that are best for us. That may very well be part of our nature but I think we all still strive to be positive and happy. If we could tap into the stream of life, I guess you could call it, we would be less likely to do anything negative. We would drop it's like it's hot which takes no effort. It's common sense.

People are constantly programmed like robots in our culture. Culture is wrong. We are not meant to live in this way. We are meant to be a part of nature and when we tap into this, the choices are easier to see, the heat from whatever it is that is burning you can be felt much easier to drop. Suffering is a choice in many ways.

If I see someone choking on a hotdog, I don't think of all the things I could or couldn't do. I immediately run over and perform the Heimlich Maneuver and save this person from choking to death. It's the hesitation that would harm this person choking. I think we all know right from wrong and know when something is hot. Some choices seem complicated but if they broken down to the basics, the core, they are just as simple as saving a person choking.

Pointing at Alan Watts again he stated that the sound when you clap your hands just happens. It doesn't think about it. It just is. The ocean does what it does. The water reflects instantly. The trees sway in the breeze. We only suffer because we get stuck on these choices that should be easy. We make them complicated.

Hey, sorry Complexity! I didn't mean to hijack your thread!

No problem DmnStr8, actually I've liked your answers.

I don't agree with you though.
You consider choice to be the negation of freedom rather than its expression and from here you infer that every tree, every rock, and everything else is free. But if everything is free, is anything free? There would just be nothing unfree to relate and therefore to define.

@dragonrider: I think you're defining choice basing yourself on ethics.
I believe ethics are arbitrary, and I find the concept of social entropy quite odd therefore.
By the way, even by leaving the concepts of good&evil valid, what move one individual towards one of those two?
Let's take an ethical neutral request as an example. Suppose I ask you to rise one of your hands. You could rise the left, the right, or do nothing.
Then I would ask: "Could you have behaved differently?"
If you would want to answer yes, how could you have empirically demonstrated that. By reversing time and making a different choice?
And even if this was the case, how could we demonstrate that time was effectively been reversed and not that such apparent reversion was just something already defined in the natural flowing of time? I mean, that it was just an apparent reversion and instead it was simply time behaving differently at those points than at any other point.

@dreaer042: Your answer was quite brief, honestly I'm not sure I've understood.
Was you trying to say that, being everything possibly antinomical and so even logic can't be taken for granted (was this Hume?), what we can do is only to accept logic as true and elaborate any other idea from such?

This is a very complex question that we will likely never have a concrete answer to.

It ultimately depends on what you believe.

One MUST consider the possibility that all things are predetermined and that free will is an illusion of our limited existence within a system that could be viewed as a macro version of a nuclear bomb.

But, this possibility being considered is a fairly bleak view of existence that causes no benefit. So, the way I see things, there is no point in believing this even if it is true.

Free will thus becomes the only viable option. EXERCISE IT!

This is debatable. It could even be considered liberating to live in a predetermined universe afterall, it means that every error, mistake or problem is meant to be.

And as i've said before, experiments have shown that people who're primed to believe that free will doesn't exist, will behave accordingly. They are less likely to restrict themselves and more likely to simply follow impulses, thinking:"me giving in to this impulse is just meant to be and there's no use in resisting it anyway".

So the believe and the feeling of having free-will actually makes sense. The experience of free-will affects the outcome of your mental processes. The experience plays a decisive role in the choices you make.

So in that sense free-will realy does exist.

So about the question about raising your right or your left hand: The point is that your mental processes do determine the outcome of the experiment. The choice to pursue one line of thinking and not the other is something that controls these mental processes. That choice exists in your counscious experience.

You could argue that this experience is also pre-determined. But is that realy an abjection?

Firstly: if you would say that free-will doesn't exist because the counscious experiences we have, have a neural correlate, then you should also say that 'you' or 'me' don't exist, as the experience of being a 'me' is also not yours in that case. Every experience, including the experience of being a person, is being reduced to something like merely watching the movie of your life. A movie in wich you don't actually play any role at all, because nothing in that movie is being done by you.

But the point is that your life is the content of that movie. And what you percieve to be 'you' is part of that content. And when you experience 'being in the moment', as dmnstr8 describes, then the content of the movie changes. And the way it changes coincides with the nature of the content itself, like in a strange loop that somehow contains itself.

Now you're in a movie in wich you're watching a movie. And when you want to switch to a different channel, the person in the movie also reaches for the remote control. He or she does what you want him or her to do. By being in the moment, the options that you experience to have, become available, and the choices you experience to make, are being made...by experiencing them.

Does this become less true, if maybe these experiences have a neural correlate? And if this pattern of electric signals has a 4-dimensional structure that is activated a millisecond prior to the moment where you actually are raising your hand, does that make all that i just said less true?

I think that realy does depend on what perspective you take, one perspective not automatically being more valid then the other here.

As you've somewhat implied it could be boolean but the reality is there's too many variables.
I do however believe freedom is an illusion whether it be freedom in society or generalized freedom (think: free will). There's only so many possible patterns that can emerge in this "physical" universe. While it may seem infinite if it existed long enough at least one thing will repeat. I am sure many things have.

Those ants crawling back and forth snagging leaves are a prime example.
Now, we're humans rather than ants but are we not living basically to do the same?
Take away the law and only leave nature and there are still things we MUST do or die.
Even having to eat defeats the whole concept of freedom - depending on how you define it.

Overall, I believe it's all an illusion.

An exercise:
Go to the nearest big store.
Stare at every person around you one at a time just for a few seconds.
Try to figure out if they work, if they're a mom, etc.
Basically try to imagine their lives.
Look at the people beside them and realize how similar they are.
Then the next ... and next ...

We're all ants running around. When a person stops looking only at themselves and considers other human beings I feel it's obvious freedom is not real in almost every way it could be defined.

I think most of you define freedom too much as an absolute thing. If you define freedom as something absolute, as 'either you're absolutely free, or you're not free at all', then indeed the whole concept of freedom is absolute bullshit.

I think this way of defining freedom is a product of 2000 years of christianity, though jewish and islamic tradition may have a simmilar way of looking at it. I don't know how taoists look at freedom, but i wouldn't be surprised if they'd have a somewhat different definition of the word. For buddhism i know that they define the word freedom in a much more subtle way. More as a relative term.

I also tend to look at it that way. To me freedom is a relative thing. Something or someone is free in relation to something else. Free-will in this sense could mean free from coercion, for instance. Or free to question your own beliefs or motives..or your own freedom. You could become more free by realising that you're not as free as you thought you where...that's a realy buddhist way of looking at freedom (buddhists tend to love those kind of paradoxes). You're free-er than most machines are because you can reflect on your own beliefs, and you can change your habits. You could decide to stop doing something, or start doing it more efficiently. I believe i'm free-er than the average north korean citizen is, but maybe not as free as kim yong un. I have a higher degree of freedom than a dog, in that i can choose to ignore a cat when i see one. But maybe a dog is more free than i in the sense that it can chase cats without anybody asking questions.