of freedom

we feel freedom when we can get what we like without constraints.

in everyday life we continuously work at configuring world, seen as a combination of metaphysical entities previously created by our intellect, according to well defined dynamic matrices of interactions. these matrices are similar to the ones we found in the past to be associated to more pleasure and less pain, and we guess that similar associations will still hold in the future. that’s why we struggle, we fight, we do. that’s the common meaning of life. freedom - in everyday life - basically means suffering as less as possible while achieving these goals.

now, panta rei, all runs, and our trials to make future reality congruent to a selection of our archetypical representations of past continuously crash against such changes.

it is true that, as our personal experience of life gets richer and our scientific knowledge advances, our control of world and of our souls becomes better, which may help us to reduce the discrepancy between our future desires and future world’s configurations. we can make our goals more feasible, we may learn how changing world more efficiently, while relying on our limited tools. this may ameliorate our perception of freedom and our sense of inner peace. growing up, becoming adult, maturing are just that.

however, fight for freedom in everyday life is anyway lost at start, by ontological need. it is lost because, in pursuing it, we want to stop the time. it is lost because we want replace “to be and not to be” by only “to be”. and this is not possible: we are not creators of reality, indeed, but only governors of it.

nevertheless, even if unconsciously, all of us living everyday’s life enjoy another deeper, ontogenically distinct, kind of freedom. this comes before everything.

it is the freedom we enjoy, when, put in front of experience’s flux , or - better - being immersed in such everchanging flux, we decide not to resign ourselves to it, but rather to organize this flux as a matrix of interactions among metaphysical entities product of our intellect and to dominate it.

it is the freedom which allows us to create our ego and the external world, to distinguish the subject and the object. it is the freedom that allows us to organize the ego as a coherent collection of agencies and the external world as the universe with its laws. it is the freedom which leads us to “discover” the isomorphism between brain and mind (which someone erroneously confuses with identity…).

without our decision there would be only chaos. our thought puts order in this chaos and makes it manageable.

no god, no intrinsic laws of nature are necessary for that, only our free thinking activity…

davidhume