Here's a little challenge for you. Suppose you are "only as free as your mind allows you to be". Does that not imply that you are either completely free or completely unfree? On your definition, either your mind is constitutive of your free will, and then you are completely free; or it is not, and you are completely unfree.
If you really do believe that the mind is a separate entity, a kind of parallel subject existing alongside the self, why would it ever give the self any freedom? This does not seem to hold logically. I'm only teasing you by the way, or rather thinking out loud
What, no, don't do that. Don't just roll over and play dead.You’re too good at this, I need to read it a couple of times more to catch on, next time I’m just going to say butterflies and then we could have a very amazing conversation around that where I can actually keep up
But... but... but I’m so good at itWhat, no, don't do that. Don't just roll over and play dead.
@Ren if freedom is an illusion, do you think that makes it less valuable than other... statuses I guess is the word?
Well there are plenty of things that don't exist that we ascribe value to. Characters in a work of fiction don't exist, and we know it but we still have value for them. The work of fiction exists, it is a thing albeit an intangible thing but the characters and situations therein, are nonexistent by their very nature. Yet they do hold value, positive or negative do they not?If freedom is an illusion, freedom does not really exist, and so it cannot be ascribed any value, whether positive or negative.
Well I suppose, but we value the work of fiction because we understand it as someone's creation. But then we shouldn't have any emotional attachment to the characters because we know they're not real. We shouldn't have any stakes in how the story ends since it is unreal but we do. The work of art exists but the characters are no more real people than a pipe is a real pipe in a painting.Don't characters in work of fiction exist in the same way that concepts exist, as mental objects; the idea of it? And we certainly assign value to those.
aaand we've already reached the point where @Ren is frustrated by the lack of depth in my analysis, lol. I did my best with the question posed and it is at this point I should confess that i'm not as deeply engrossed in philosophy as many others on this site probably are.Ok, so let me attempt to clarify because I feel like many different understandings of "value" are being jumbled here.
A) I suggest that there is objective moral value, subjective moral value, objective aesthetic value, and subjective aesthetic value.
B) I understood the question about the value of freedom as: "Does freedom have objective moral value as a good thing?" I personally believe it does, but this is a difficult topic that philosophers don't agree on. I commit to the idea that in order to have objective moral value, something must objectively exist. Something can exist immaterially (a concept, a fictional character) though of course, the fact that something exists does not automatically ascribe it objective moral value.
C) A work of fiction, to me, can be argued to have either objective or subjective aesthetic value, but I have difficulty imagining that it could have moral value. If you think that a work of fiction has moral value, it's likely that it's not the work itself that has the value, but the ideas that it re-presents.
there are many kinds of freedom
You shameless moral relativist
aaand we've already reached the point where @Ren is frustrated by the lack of depth in my analysis, lol. I did my best with the question posed and it is at this point I should confess that i'm not as deeply engrossed in philosophy as many others on this site probably are.