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[–] Kromulent 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

This is an interesting question, something I chew on a lot.

Consider how it would be to live under an oppressive regime, and one day, when you've finally had enough, you decide to resist. You can make a good argument that, at that very moment, you have become free. Your body is still constrained and your acts of resistance might fail, but your soul, your mind, the part of you that chooses, is free.

Unless we awake to find ourselves in heaven, our choices are always constrained by reality. Our freedom does not depend on this. We can be free even if we are poor, and even if we are weak. Even if we are in jail.

I appreciate that this is an odd way to think of freedom, but if I think of it in any other way, then my freedom depends on things that are outside my control, and that does not seem correct either. If my freedom depends upon the proper alignment of the stars and the good will of the powerful, then it's not really freedom, it's just license.

I also feel pretty confident that freedom does not necessarily mean resistance. When you resist something, you are still defined by it. Freedom is more about focusing yourself on what you choose to focus on, and not necessarily focusing on the thing that happens to most be in your way.

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[–] BirdLawAttorney 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

So I've been trying to think of a way to describe death as the ultimate freedom from everything, from even the reality of needing to make choices, but that's that's depressing as fuck, plus I think the song is talking about how to lead your life, not how to be free from our earthly constraints.

That's too much freedom, man.

I like your perspective on this, I do believe that how we think dictates a large part of our existence and it seems plausible to me that in that we can find freedom.

However, I'm not even sure I believe in free will, but that opens up a whole different discussion about causality and randomness.

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[–] Kromulent 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago  (edited ago)

I used to really struggle with the idea of death, of nonexistence. What got me was the fact that you never know you're dead... so are you just trapped in that last moment forever?

Then I had to have my wisdom teeth removed and I had the kind of anesthesia that knocks you all the way out. Like most people eventually do, I got to experience non-exisitance for a little while. I came away feeling like I totally understood it, but I honestly couldn't explain it to my younger self. It's one of those things that's intuitively obvious but logically impossible.

I will say that whenever I've passed out drunk or stoned, those last moments are pretty unconstrained. All I want to do is lie still and feel my eyes roll back into my head, and I am entirely free to do it.

As for free will, I suppose we'll understand it when we understand what consciousness is. Some people like to say it's just an emergent property of a sufficiently complex network, but I think that that's just restating the problem. What property, and how? It's like saying god created the universe... OK, so who created god? It's just moving the original question back one step.

Terrence McKenna has an interesting comment (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

I don't believe my consciousness originates in my brain any more than I believe that the actors in a television show live inside my TV: the box just isn't big enough.

I don't believe that myself, but I do have to admit that any correct explanation for the origin of consciousness is going to be pretty wild. To paraphrase another half-remembered quote:

If you leave hydrogen alone for long enough, it begins to wonder where it came from.

[–] [deleted] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

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