feeling in control:paradox::paradox:not having free will [Hard, Chapter Twenty]

[kanzeon_2040]

What we experience as "consciousness" or as "free will" is the work we do synthesizing and deciding -- but there is no alternative to the way we actually decided something -- we decided that way, it has flown into reality, and the rest follows deterministically.

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Is all matter inherently conscious at some level, and what it feels depends on how it's organized?

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For me, consciousness is the act of trying to model the outside world using my brain and the tools I've learned how to use.

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So why is it important for us to feel like we are in control?

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We do have control over certain things, but not over all things -- instead some of us imagine an omniscient & omnipotent God who does control all these things, except that he allows us free will. How convenient.

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What I feel as consciousness is deeply rooted in who I am and what I am -- that I perceive reality via my senses, and organize it, and predict it, and act upon it, as a human in this particular point in spacetime.

Within my span of control.

Paradoxically, the sensation of control is both anchor and mirage. It grounds our choices, our actions, our triumphs, and our failures, yet it whispers, deceitfully, that we stand apart from the tides of causality. To feel in control is to live the paradox: to embrace the illusion that this moment, this choice, was uniquely ours, when in truth it was inevitable-woven by threads we could not see, let alone grasp.

Paradox reflects the mind’s uneasy dance with determinism. Not having free will is the ultimate paradox-our consciousness, this luminous theatre of decisions and deliberations, is the result of forces we neither chose nor control. Yet here we, actors and directors, imagine the script is ours to write.

The harder we grip the illusion of control, the more we become plaything, twisting and turning within, as though our grasp could hold the universe steady. And yet, in surrendering control, there is no liberation, no salvation from the paradox. For even surrender itself is determined.

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This chapter dives into the tension between control and determinism, inviting the reader to linger in the paradox, to feel the weight of inevitability, and to reflect on whether control-even as an illusion-offers meaning, or simply the comfort of not needing to ask.