Perfect Freedom and the Nature of Choice

Freedom’s potency as an idea and concept of how we live our lives and what we strive for both individually and societally is unrivaled. We fight over and for this concept in our politics and even have engaged in warfare over this concept. Freedom, by definition, is the ability to make choices without compulsion or force. As an individual it is the ability to direct yourself down the path by which you desire to go down in life and not be forced into something you don’t wish to be a part of. As a nation, it is the ability to govern oneself without the forceful influence of other powers. I want to talk about a metaphysical concept of freedom. This idea entails the perfect manifestation of the state of being free, rightly entitled perfect freedom. Simply put, it is freedom of choice with unlimited options, all of which are benevolent options. In a sense, you could do no wrong, but you could do everything right. Now reality, by its sheer finite nature, has only a limited amount of options for an individual to choose from at any given moment, and you can only choose one option at any given moment. Your choices often affect the amount of options you have in the future. You may make a choice that opens up more options than you had previously, or you can make a choice that limits your options even more. In a perfect world, your options to make the right choices would be limitless, with each choice opening the path to countless more choices of benefit. In our world, however, the options, no matter how numerous, are not infinite. You have the possibility of making faulty choices that limit your options even further than what they were before. Other factors,

including coercion, confinement, access to resources, and the limits of the physical body we occupy, play a role in our options that are presented. In physics, parts of an object can usually only take one action at a time. Human beings can only say one word at a time and our body parts are limited to being in only one state at a given moment, whether it is motion or stasis. The simplest part of a body can only do one thing at a time. This ranges from simple cells to the parts of an atom, or how I am only able to type one letter or number at a time on this keyboard. So it is with options and choices. We can only choose one option at a time, albeit occasionally in rapid succession, but still one option at any given instant. We can either go one way or another, we cannot go both. Even if a body is moving through space in both an upward and leftward direction, it is still only going in a singular direction. Since the body cannot be in two places at once, it cannot go in two directions at once. You cannot go down two paths at the same time. In life, we are faced with many options to choose from, but the nature of choice limits our ability to choose two options at the EXACT same time. Now some may argue that you can choose two options in the exact same moment, but since time works linearly and you are one body in time, you can only choose to do one thing in any given moment. Now break your body down to parts. Yes, you can type and speak at the same time, but each part of your body doing those things is still only doing one thing at a time. Since you only have one tongue, you can only ask one question at a time. Since your fingers can only hit one letter in the linear succession of typing a sentence, only one letter gets typed in a given instant. With the choices you make in life, you often can choose to pay your bills or spend your money on luxury items you don’t need. If you are on a limited income, you cannot do both. But your options expand when more resources are accessible. If you have more resources, you have more options, but every fundamental part of a system can only do one thing at a time, and often systems as whole are limited in their functionality by this fact.