Freedom and Meaning

I) Imagine you wake up in a white box outside of conventional space-time. A drip feed is keeping you alive by pumping nutrients directly into you, with absolutely no waste products. What would you do? How would you decide what to do? Nothing you do would have any context; there would be no means of discerning one choice from another. For eternity you would be trapped. Perhaps the only choice available to you is whether to tear off the drip-feed and wait to die, or hold out for the hope of escape (which is of course futile, as this is an evil analogy!)

A less evil analogy could be as follows. Imagine you have been invited into the control centre of the universe by an omnipotent being. Before you is a vast computer containing a million switches. There is no way of knowing what any of the switches do, and no way of seeing the aftermath of pressing them. Again, there are no meaningful choices to be made here, and you may as well leave.

A final (slightly more evil than the above but less evil than the first) analogy could be as follows. Imagine you are a sentient mind in a vast box the size of a star, with thousands of liquid-metal tentacles spiralling out from your core. The universe is now your oyster, but would you return to Earth? Would you seek out other creatures like you? What would you do? How would you decide?

II) Context is necessary for meaningful choice, and thus for freedom. We cannot choose without a context to act within. This context is not only our environment and space in the narrative of the world, but also our physical limitations. We understand the universe through our bodies. We are creatures which were generated out of the cosmos and this puts us in common with other creatures. We are human beings, and though we may take this obvious fact for granted, it is an essential part of how we choose and what we choose. Simply put, choice is not something “pure and detached”, but “messy and involved”.

The context common to all of humanity, for all of history, is that we are in relation to nature. The natural phenomena of Earth is a gift which exists before we do, and which we have played little part in generating. We have followed plants and animals through time, and they have intrigued us, given us something to fear, impressed us, or all of these things at once. We have always lived in a world with nature.

A world without nature would be disastrous in and of itself, but also for its effect on us. It would deny us the intuitive pleasure gained in just observing, say, a tree, with no conscious purpose as to why. We cannot articulate why it feels meaningful, but this does not deny its meaningfulness. It demonstrates the remaining mystery of our being, that we are not only the mind which perceives; there is more at work inside us. If we were to destroy nature in its entirety (a scenario which is possible as our technology and greed grows exponentially) we would be destroying the background of every human civilization in history.

III) We are forced into the world, naked and hungry. We are forced into the small personal narratives of our day-to-day lives and the meta-narratives of breathing empires, woven so tightly together that without intending it we can effect distant narratives. We are forced into a language, which creates for us a boundary, or foundation, of word-thoughts. We are forced into a morality, absorbing the values drummed into us whether we like them or not. We are forced into a world-view consisting of all the information we uncritically absorb in our pre-philosophy days. As children we make decisions despite our lack of understanding, and this is our original sin, not some spiritual fall, but our immature actions.

None of this means that our personality is decided for us, nor our choices. For if you accept that context is necessary for there to be meaningful choices, and thus some form of choosing will, the fact that we have circumstances is what grants us freedom.

The fact that we cannot decide entirely what our “fate” will be, that we cannot immediately overcome subconscious forces and bend the world around us is all a necessary part of our freedom. Our will to choose may be messy, it may contradict itself, it may be ponderous and take time to unfold, but it is there. Indeed, it is precisely the time that it takes our choices to manifest inside a context that makes our choices meaningful. Rapid choices which are instantly fulfilled run against our nature. Rapid choice, like rapid change, eventually exhausts all possibilities and leads to a stagnation from which nothing good might be salvaged.

IV) What happens in this nightmare scenario of too many choices, too many entrances, all of them leading nowhere? What happens when we have infinite expectation, no boundaries, no real communities? We are living it.

It is known as Consumerism, although this is a euphemism for materialistic nihilism. Obsession with commodities, rampant and endless desiring, with no meaning even within oneself. This mindless hedonism is divorced from any narratives, it is atomizing, separating, and fundamentally unrewarding. It is fleeting, empty, unattached, and nothing sticks inside the soul. It is the bad form of individualism, an unhealthy individualism where the individual is defined by what they can have and not what they are, a mark so staining that it makes all individualisms seem wretched. Taken to extremes it destroys all connection to the past and all concern for the future, all meaning divorced from its context. The worse it gets the more powerful it becomes; this goallessness is what keeps the wheels of consumerism turning; it thrives on the void inside us and spins an illusion of symbolic rewards to account for it. It is the destroyer of narratives, the generator of irreverence, whose war-cry is “I don't care about anything but my own little buzz”.

It is a negative form of nihilism, where all paths lead nowhere, and there is not even a personal notion of truth. If we say that free will needs to be utterly free to be called free, then we are paradoxically left with the destroyer of freedom.

V) True freedom, therefore, requires a narrative, individual self-discipline, patient cultivation, a rock to push against, harmony with nature, a community to belong to, a great but not infinite variety, a little wildness, a cause to fight for, a truth to seek, a foundation to stand upon, and, of course, a lot of philosophical thinking.

Selim 'Selim' Talat

Desperate for meaning, so desperate - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

Desperate for meaning, so desperate

Determinism states that things could not have been different to how they are now. This also means that the future cannot be any different to how it is 'planned' out to be. If we believe that we are just the end of a long chain of cause and effect outside of our control, then the future must also be equally discoverable.

I wish to concentrate on the oldest form of determinism, Fate. Great heroes throughout history have risen up to meet their destiny and do the bidding of Fate. Fate represents a certain form of order or balance that must be restored. With this destiny comes a sense of purpose; an end result that we have to strive for. I wish to demonstrate that, sadly, purpose is not simple, is not black and white, and that beyond humanity there is probably nothing but the slow march of nature.

Everything happens for a reason?

It does not take much imagination to think of a child being born mutated by radioactive waste - this happens every day in certain warzones. If we examine the misfortune of the child on an individual level we quite simply have to ask 'why is this particular child suffering this particular fate?' What could the child have done to deserve being born with such deformities, with a lifespan no greater than a few tortured breaths. There is quite simply no way the child could have deserved or earned this particular situation for some wrong doing. Evidently, if Fate does exist it is greatly unfair, and does not always reward or punish who it is supposed to.

 

Is the child then part of some greater scheme of things? If this is the case, then Fate is not accounting for us on an individual basis, but is considering some larger overall narrative - the horrors of war, for instance, could be part of some fateful plan to end a greater suffering by shocking us with its horrible nature. However if this is the case then why is one individual sacrificed over another? What possible explanation is there for my being born in a materially rich environment and someone else being born in the worst imaginable scenario? It seems random, without reason. Yet fate is not random and it cannot decide lightly who shall live and who shall die, or else it is no longer fate – a reason requires reasoning.

Now we have a greater question. Why is one part of the world suffering the worst imaginable fate (the death of children) when another isn't? This idea of deserving, reaping what one sows, is heavily undermined by the events happening in the world at this very moment. People are not getting what they deserve – the people we would call bad are not being punished, and the people we call good are not always rewarded. Does Fate have a reason to punish the greater percentage of humankind?

Fate is nothing more than a tradition from a more superstitious age. At one time it would have been used to justify the status of the powerful and placate the powerless by assuring them it could not have been any other way. When combined with power, this ability to look into the future with as much certainty as we can look into the past, is a dangerous thing. Clearly it is an idea which could only have survived in a world where knowledge of the world was incomplete. Fate could only exist in a world where progress was slow, or non-existent, with cultures imagining themselves to hold eternal answers to eternal questions; fate could only exist if the thinkers of a culture thought they had reached the end of their development on earth.

  To prove that knowledge of the world decreases the credibility of fate, we need only look at the vast increase in the human population in the last century, the annihilation of diseases and the dramatic raising of our material conditions. If there is a reason for everything, and everything leads back to fate, then this cosmic force has chosen now of all times to populate the earth with humans. Ideas of reincarnation are massively threatened; for once being born human was the sign that your soul was rising up the ladder to nirvana. The simple conclusion from this is that there have been a lot of good tigers around recently. Can you see how absurd a chain of reincarnation (insects at the bottom, humans at the top) would be if it was proposed in our modern world of massive population growth and endless technological change?

So, where do we stand?

Those who claim  they can see into the future should not be written off. How do we know that someone doesn't have visions of what may be, the creativity to combine elements in some incredible way, or some special sensitivity to human character in relation to unseen forces? We do not, and cannot write off people as not possessing these powers. However, the seer or the oracle, when they are so blatantly political, we should be very, very sceptical of; it certainly is not their task to order our societies or tell us what to think.

Is fate then a comfort to people in an age where god has fallen as a power? I cannot see how it can be a comfort to know that some cosmic power has given myself a well-functioning body and some other person severe mutations and a painfully brief life Suffering does not need to be explained away with fate, because suffering is not inevitable.

There is probably no purpose beyond humanity. It strikes me as odd why we would need to search for powers beyond the world, to explain the world, when there is so much on offer in good old human greed, ignorance, violence, apathy, and so on. Going back to the children being cursed to short and painful lives, we can explain it in purely human terms – that is, societies still going to war with one another without universal regard for human life. Human beings are more concerned with their own immediate experiences and not so much on distant people they consider different to them, or mere statistics. This is an earthly explanation for suffering that makes sense.

  And take note. We do not need to wait for some afterlife to win what we would call justice. We could have it today if only we were empowered to do so (and if only we could philosophize until we came up with an adequate explanation for it!).

By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Open Topic' Issue 31