Steven,
I’m not quite sure that you’ve pinned that down. One could keep arguing the impulses bubbling up through us, desires, appetites, etc. are beyond our control and yet come from some element that is us. It gets circular pretty quick.
Maybe a way to dissect this issue would not be to search for some ideal we refer to as “freedom,” but simply start with that essential dichotomy of our desires and our judgements. The head and the heart.
The notion of “freedom” actually does come from that tension. That our desires be unconstrained by judgement. That we can both have our cake and eat it too. That we don’t have to chase down that sequence of cause and effect, to see if we, as an autonomous being, had noticeable input into this process.
The evident fact is that there is no resolution to this dilemma. Even if we describe the consciousness as nothing, it still becomes a factor, like the number zero.
What should be considered is not so much the sequence of cause and effect, but the process of it. Time.
We are mobile organisms, so in order to navigate our environment, we naturally experience it as a sequence of perceptions, sorting and judging them, in order to decide our directions. In which case, our “freedom” naturally emerges as this need to direct our desires to live and propagate. The heart is the motor and the head is the steering.
It is just that we view this effect of time narratively. As a mental construction of the sequence. Thus it seems determined, as each event leads to the next.
Yet the reality of time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change, turning future to past. So there is only this physical present, aka, “conserved energy” and its constantly changing configuration creates the effect of time. As well as temperature, pressure, color, etc. Think frequency and amplitude.
There is no physical “dimension” of time, because the past is being consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka, causality. Yet the input into any particular event cannot be fully known prior to the event and the process of determination that decides how potentialities coalesce into actualities only occurs as this present state.
Of which our conscious state is a part. Thus consciousness is like the energy, always and only present, while thoughts are the patterns generated by it, rising and falling, future to past, potential, to actual, to residual.
We are part of nature’s process of selection.
Though trying to make this argument seems fairly futile, as it requires examining not just the thought process, but the context of the thought process and the narrative culture emerging from it.
As a friend once put it; Stop it, you’re hurting my head.
It appears our world is currently more governed by sociopathic desires, than any informed judgement of the larger realities and those fields professionally tasked with understanding the process seem more interesting in chasing down their own cultural and historical references, than anything remotely resembling outside the box thinking.
Happy 2020.
