Freedom is an Abstract Idea

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Freedom is an Abstract Idea

I love chocolates, I love freedom, I love mom, I love my dog, I love April in Paris, etc. When we abstract (disassociate from any instance) we remove the contingent (unpredictable). When I abstract all of this lovin I am left with that which is ‘necessary and sufficient’ I am left with an emotion. When I attach this abstract idea of ‘love’ to these other entities I have a specific instance of an abstract idea.

Is the emotion attached to each one of these abstract ideas exactly the same? I suspect no one knows or can know.

When I am ready to die for or to kill for ‘patriotism’–love of country—I guess I should better understand what this business of abstract ideas is all about.

No doubt there are many different conceptions of this expression ‘abstract idea’ but I have found one that works for me and it appears to be well founded, justified by empirical evidence, and endorsed by reputable cognitive scientists. I shall use the metaphor ‘abstract idea is chemical compound’. A metaphor has a number of meanings and one important meaning is ‘simile’.

In chemistry we have atoms joined together to make molecules and molecules joined together to make compounds.

“Metaphor allows conventional mental imagery from sensorimotor domains to be used for domains of subjective experience.”

An infant is born and when embraced for the first time by its mother the infant experiences the sensation of warmth. In succeeding experiences the warmth is felt along with other sensations.

Empirical data verifies that there often happens a conflation (blending) of this sensation experience together with the development of a subjective (abstract) concept we can call affection. With each similar experience the infant fortifies both the sensation experience and the affection experience and a little later this conflation aspect ends and the child has these two concepts in different mental spaces. This conflation leads us to readily recognize the metaphor ‘affection is warmth’.

Cognitive science uses metaphor in the standard usage as we are all accustomed to but it also uses a new concept that you are unfamiliar with unless you have been reading this book. This new concept is called ‘conceptual metaphor’. Conceptual metaphor is the heart of this new cognitive science and represents what will be in my opinion the first paradigm of cognitive science.

In my example I speak of two separate mental spaces one being the experience of being held and the other is the subjective experience of affection. The theory behind the ‘conceptual metaphor’ is that the structure of the sense experience can and is often automatically without conscious intention mapped into a new mental space.

The experience structure can be mapped into a new mental space and thereby becomes part of the structure of that new mental space. In this fashion these conceptual metaphors can act somewhat like atoms that join together to make a molecule.

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Hi Cobs you might like Stirner on this subject - he throws “freedom” along with many other such abstractions into the realm of “spooks” - things which can control us and be used to manipulate us and are substantially outside our control.

The other problem with freedom is that it has no positive content its always defined as an absence of some oppression or obstacle - were as Stirner dis the idea of “property” taking/appropriating/making your own what you are fit for:

Says Max

[i]
All Things Are Nothing To Me*

  What is not supposed to be my concern! ** First and foremost, the Good Cause, *** then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally, even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!"

[/i]

flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchi … 1.html#pp3

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Good Morning Chuck,
Thank you for the interesting post.

Is this book, by chance, Lakeoff and Johnson’s, Metaphors We Live By? If so, I tend to agree with their general thesis, which is to say, we explain one thing in terms of another thing. Lakeoff teamed up with Nunez to extend their ideas to mathematics, in their (controversial), Where Mathematics Comes From (btw, the Appendix concerning Euler’s Equation (e^(I*Pi)-1=0) was fun).

To count as explicit abstractions, shouldn’t “I love mom” be instead, “I love mothers”? And shouldn’t “I love my dog” be instead, “I love dogs?” It’s questionable whether an emotional attachment directed at a specific thing counts as a genuine abstraction.

Very well said, Chuck. I wonder, would you die or kill for an abstract idea? I would not. I would certainly die to protect my nephew’s life. I would most likely die to protect your nephew’s life. But, in the words of Paul Eldridge

“Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.”

I cherish my ideas and my theories, and yet none of them are so dear that I wouldn’t throw them out in a moment to make way for a better idea, or a clearer theory. On the other hand, would I toss out my wife the moment a “better” woman came along? Some men obviously do. I would not. My wife is not fungible nor is she an abstraction.

The idea behind the idea that a man would die for an idea is barely coherent.

“Let our conjectures, our theories, die in our stead! We may still learn to kill our theories instead of killing each other.”
Karl Popper, Natural Selection and the Emergence of the Mind

Again, great post, Chuck. I’m sorry that I only had time this morning to talk around the edges of it. Perhaps this weekend…

Best,
Michael

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Krossi says–"Hi Cobs you might like Stirner on this subject "

Could you give me some book or Internet reference that I might study?

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Michael quotes Eldridge–"“Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.”

Beautiful quote! That is somewhat the thinking that led me to think about this matter and to develop this short essay. I do these essays as a important way to understand what I am studying.

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He only has one and thats “the ego and its own” - only problem is he’s a very, very bad writer and conflates his own ideas with sarcastic versions of his oponents - hard to read - In some ways Nietzsche covers a lot of it in an easier way

but here’s a link for it any ways!

flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchi … eego0.html

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Pole…

I forgot to mention that Lakoff is coauthor of both books you mentioned and also of “Philosophy in the Flesh”. Why was “Where Mathematics Comes From” controversial?

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Coberst wrote:

It challenged a long-held worship of mathematics as a quasi-religion. Not only a few mathematicians and physicists continue to believe that mathematics is a way to “see into the mind of God” (Paul Davies, et. al.).

"Some people believe in magic. Some believe in mathematics. And some people believe that math is magical. Somehow math manages to describe the world with uncanny accuracy…Four decades ago, the physicist Eugene Wigner expressed that wonder in a famous essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” “The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it,” Dr. Wigner wrote. Many scientists suspect that math’s success signifies something deep and true about the universe, disclosing an inherent mathematical structure that rules the cosmos, or at least makes it comprehensible…

But not to George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez. As cognitive scientists, they see a world ruled not by math, but by the human brain. Whatever might be “real,” they write, human knowledge depends solely on the brain and its own ways of finding things out. Math is not a discovery about the external world, but an invention rooted in metaphors linked to human thoughts, sensations and actions. Where does mathematics come from? Drs. Lakoff and Nunez; “It comes from us”…"
Tom Siegfried, Review of Where Does Mathematics Come From

Regards,
Michael

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I have always agreed with the premise of this thread.

We are constantly reminded of freedom, living in this land of liberty, but who is freer, the man in commuter traffic on his way to his 40 hour work week, where he almost has to fake sick to get a day off, or the men in orange suits picking up trash on the side of that same highway. Sure there is a varying degree of freedom, but nobody is free in the true sense of the word. I’m still striving for it though.

I forgot where this quote comes from and might mess it up, but here it is anyway.

“The best slaves are the ones who are unaware of their captivity.”

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Hi Kevconman,

Yes, I agree that human freedom only exists to a degree. But I want to ask you if freedom, in the largest possible sense, would be attractive to you?

Your quote reminds me of another by Wittgenstein; one that I often think of.

“A man can be imprisoned in a room with an unlocked door which opens inwards, so long as it does not occur to him to pull it rather than push it.” Culture and Value

Regards,
Michael

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What a great quote, I’ll remember that one.

I would love to be fully free. However, I think the only kind of freedom that would find my terms aimable would be one in which I was not responsible for my thoughts, words, actions. I’m a bit selfish. But I would like that freedom.

I’d like to walk in to grocery store shouting," I love meat, dead dead meat. I’m a T-rex. and I love meat." I’d like to do that without reprocussion. I’d enjoy a few wary looks, but no handcuffs please.

I’d like to tell someone they’re ugly, If I think them so. Not to be hurtful, but to be truthful to my own subjective view. That freedom would feel nice. A bit egocentric as well.

I wish my words thought actions would not affect others either.

Oh well, I’m trapped.

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DUDE(ette?)!
I totally have that picture (your avatar) as my avatar on yahoo1!!!
Go Mark Ryden!

do you know Lori Earley’s stuff?
http://www.loriearley.com/

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Michael

I love that quote–

Your quote reminds me of another by Wittgenstein; one that I often think of.

“A man can be imprisoned in a room with an unlocked door which opens inwards, so long as it does not occur to him to pull it rather than push it.” Culture and Value

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I’m free. I want to be free. I’m not free. I think I’m free. I don’t feel free. I am freer than free. I am not free.

Imprison that in a room with a revolving door.

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Hello Kevconman,

Have you ever wondered what perfect freedom would entail? If you care to wonder with me then let’s begin by noticing what you’re doing at this moment. You’re both reading what I’ve written and mentally composing a response to it. In other words, you’re not acting, you’re reacting. But a perfectly free being only acts, it never reacts. This might seem like an odd idea, so let me stress that we’re not just talking about having a heaping-measure of more freedom, we’re talking about having total freedom. In order to have total freedom you’d need to be an unmoved-mover, of sorts. In his lecture notes, G. J. Mattey wrote
“But the deepest sense of freedom is that of thinking and acting in a way that is not determined by any prior state of affairs.”

How would you would appear to others if you were totally free? Well, someone might say to you, “Good Morning, How are you today?” And you would reply. Er…well, you wouldn’t reply, but in a moment or two you might blurt out “eugheteopm” or you might whisper “klpocscht.” In other words, the rest of the world would view you as a mental defective. If a fly landed on your nose you really couldn’t swat it away, because that would entail a reaction - the very thing you are not permitted to do as an absolutely free being. Again, a perfect freedom to act implies an absolute inability to react.

Galen Strawson tells of Krishnamurti approaching the question from another direction.

“Only the unintelligent mind exercises choice in life. A truly intelligent mind simply cannot have choice, because it can…only choose the path of truth.”

While I might not have chosen the word “truth,” I see what he’s getting at. If you were omniscient you might lose the liberty of acting foolishly altogether. Umm…that doesn’t sound like much fun.

Consider, also, this quote of Spinoza, Part I, Prop. XXXII

“God cannot be said…to act from freedom of the will. And if this is so, then [being omniscient] he cannot think that he does so.”

If I were God, then I fear that I would rein in Hell. Which is to say, I would no more want to be omniscient than I’d want to be perfectly free. I’m better off an ignorant philosopher with the joy of discovering new ideas ahead of me. As for having perfect freedom, I think I’d rather laugh at a friend’s joke or respond to my wife’s warmth than have such a thing.

Regards,
Michael

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Michael,

The total freedom your described and those determined affairs do make for the deepest part of our discussion. In this way, perfect freedom would consist of being free from reaction.

But I’d like to speak to you about the other freedom you menitoned. It is the one most preferable to me, based on the likelyhood of ever escaping that whole prior cause thing. It seems like the only freedom that hints at availability. It is the freedom from the Other. That is, the reaction of other people.

There was a old man who I used to see pacing the aisles of a chuch basement in the middle of an AA meeting, and occasionally he would shout a word or phrase that had very little to do with anything. Some people would get annoyed, but the majority of people laughed at the unexpected nature of the shout. I remember admiring this man for his “freedom” You see, people thought he was so odd, that they forgave him and did not hold him RESPONSIBLE for his distruption. Even if they did tell him to settle down, I hardly believe he was aware of the bother he was causing. He had freedom from the expectations and the obligations of the other. And they even fed him and gave him coffee. Here he was, “mentally defective”, and surviving with the best of use. Happier too. I would see him smile and his eyes would water, and there would be no way of telling what was on his mind. A mysterious happiness. A dumb happiness. Mentally advantageous, but looked down upon happiness.

This led me to experiments on my own. If I was on an elevator with a group of strangers, I may say something out loud about pornography or how I like to pour soup on my head, and always would the strangers laugh. The uncomfortable confined space was something to behold. And there was a freedom in it. It was a much needed break from the routine. And I was in control of it. The only thing that kept me from being totally free was hindsight. Did I offend someone? Did I make someone nervous? But I figured that if I could care less about that, therin would lie a freedom from my responsibility to the Other. Sure we’re all interconnected, but I want escape. That, for me, would the only freedom that exists in our reach, given that cause and effect have such a stranglehold over our existence.

Yes, I speak of madness. Free from the judgement of the other. When 2+2=5 and there’s no need to prove it.

If there is a flaw in this arguement, please tell me so. I imagine if I lived alone on this planet and I yelled into the grand cayon, the rockslide that carried me away would then be considered the other.

But that’s all I want. Totally freedom from the other. Put it on my wish list.

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“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace; in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad…and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.” Rebecca West, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon

Sorry to reply in someone else’s voice, only, I can’t improve upon her sentiment. As I’ve already recounted once or twice here over the years - Been there. Done it. On account of my seeing another post of yours I’ll tell it again. If you’ve read it before then save yourself a boring tale and just quit here.

I had a rough childhood, Kev. No, not in the sense that daddy didn’t make it to my soccer games, but in the sense of nearly daily beatings, culminating with a close brush with death at the hands of my dad; a knife in my skull and him headed off to jail/mental institution.

I went through a period of wanting to extend the compliment that dad had given me. I boxed in college, lifted weights, and incessantly picked fights - when I wasn’t reading Schopenhauer (I always loved to read). I became your standard-issue prick. I eventually dropped out of school to join the military. Boot camp was my Disneyland. Humiliation, pain, denial, Stoic resignation; a veritable Magic Kingdom. There were five awards given to 130 guys on graduation day - three of which I took with me: Honorman, Military Indoctrination and Physical Fitness.

Life aboard ship was boring enough that I used to beat a Cuban kid for my pastime. To my dying shame, I made his life a living hell. I’d catch him on alone in the focsle, waste him, and then hurry along on the bosun’s errand. I have no idea why he didn’t cut my throat while I was sleeping. Perhaps I wanted him to do what I hadn’t the courage to do myself? In any case, I didn’t exactly excel on regular duty. The worst occasion was a nasty bar-fight in Yarmouth, Massachusetts, for which I barely escaped doing time for.

To make a short story long, I somehow manged to stumble over a rare jewel of a woman. Even more strange, she cared about me. After we married we moved deep into the mountains of Vermont - so that I wouldn’t have to be around other people. We built two houses, literally, with our own hands. We made our electricity from a hydro-electric turbine, cut our firewood with a two-man crosscut saw, hewed spruce trees into beams, learned to lay stone walls, garden and so on, and so forth. I’m guessing that I don’t have to explain why we never had children of our own.

Only twenty years later and I emerged from my chrysalis. I realized that I had lived in a hostile world of my own making. My problem wasn’t the world or other people. I was my problem. As the Spanish saying goes - I’d been drowning in a glass of water. It didn’t matter that my father filled the glass.

Looking back on everything I have learned; how to put chains on car tires with frozen fingers, how to make maple syrup, all that… of everything I’ve been through, the most amazing thing I have learned is that I need other people. I need to love them and be loved by them. Together, my hope is to multiply our joy, and together divide our sorrows.

You might expect me to tell how I now wear a saffron-colored robe and float around with Zen-like tranquility. Nothing like that.

“The man who is angry at the right things and with the right people, and further, as he ought, when he ought, and as long as he ought, is praised. This will be the good-tempered man.”, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

You don’t fail by becoming angry. You fail by becoming angry at the wrong things.

A few years ago I was walking my wife to a fabric store in Boston. It was in an industrial part of town over near Chinatown. Walking down a street between two tall brick factories we came upon a gang of ten or so fifteen or sixteen year-old, skinny, Chinese kids, kicking the shit out of one of their own. They had him up against the wall, taking turns, winding up and kicking him in the gut. I think my blue eyes must have turned black. I turned my wife back against her protest, and sprinted towards them. I scared myself, so I have to think one of them must have wet his pants.

Okay, you’re thinking it was a big Kung-Fu mixup, eh? Actually, no. They let me pull the kid out and walk away. I walked the kid back down the street and found my wife. Of course my wife was beside herself. The way she now tells the story you’d think she was married to Bruce Lee, reincarnated. Fortuantely, she doesn’t recount the story of how I used to mess up the poor Cuban kid on my ship, at least not at dinner parties.

Anger is a powerful locomotive. Hatred is a suicide bomb.

“A passion examined must earn its place in our personality.” Robert Solomon, Passions

Don’t quench you passion. Drive it. Drive that locomotive.

As for shocking folks in an elevator; my buddy and I used to go to a local department store and together we’d suddenly pull on the black-rubber escalator rail. We never quite managed to pull an old lady down the stairs, but we never lost hope. Of course, today I recognize that one of those ladies could easily had been my mother. If a puke had done that to my mother then I might have killed him.

In other words, Kev, I think you’re probably a good lad, despite your quasi-evil elevator manners. :wink:

Cheers,
Michael

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Michael,

What you’ve shared, I’d like to print out and save for future reading. I hope you don’t mind.

My version of freedom has been based on hatred or, at least my feeling of being superior to stupid people. That’s why this website has been such a blessing lately, because it lets me know there are people who think just as much.

I’m sorry to hear about your rough childhood. The victim never wants to become the victimizer, but that pattern seems like a tough imprint to shake. The guilt. The shame. I am glad, however, that you’ve got to a better point of peaceful living, especially with good woman at you side. What great healers woman are.

My childhood wasn’t as rough physically, or as often, no, it only took one bit of trauma to do my head in. And it was by my father, too. You see, you tell people your father whipped you with a belt and people will listen, identify almost, but when you tell people you dad got sexual with you, that’s when people can’t stomach the details. So I’ll spare you that, naturally. I’ll just say, he messed me up, and left town, never to be seen again.

This has affected every area of my life, especially my fear of rejection. So I guess, I avoid people and hate them in my free time, in order to not risk rejection. And when I stop isolating and go out into public, I usually display masochistic behavior; example: I just went to a bar last weekend and I taunted all the patrons until they converged on me, pummled me, and tossed me out on the sidewalk. I knew what I was doing the whole time and I knew what would happen to me but I did it anyway. This has become my pattern, causing myself a disruptive life of harm.

By your using the quote about how some people want a happy life, but then they also want to be insane, it reminded me of my present situation. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Sometimes I look at the condtion and tell myself that I created it, that I want to be disabled so I dont have to work around other people, when the truth is what my father did tweaked my attenna, made my senses sharper, made me too accutely aware of the suffering around me. The other side of that truth is that I’m fully capable of getting a job and going back to school, I just dont know if I want to be part of a growing social network. All that rejection, just waiting to happen.

This is where the drowning in a glass of water that my father filled comes into play. I know I would be well-adjusted if I let go of these disgruntled, hostile feelings. Maybe that’s the freedom I should try for. Its just so damn hard.

Anyway, I’m saving your post so I can encourage myself. Thanks.

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Michael says–“Don’t quench you passion. Drive it. Drive that locomotive.”

Well said Michael!