Why Freedom is Unknowable and Enters Our Universe from Without

Fear of the Sky

For a century and a half, Western philosophy has been celebrating its victory over God.
But having slain the dragon, it has grown to fear the sky itself.

The transcendent has become the new taboo. The ultimate intellectual fear.
And now, anyone who speaks of something "outside the system" is branded a heretic. Not by the Inquisition, but by a peer-reviewer in an academic journal.

The result is a philosophy with its soul torn out—brilliant as a scalpel, and just as dead. It has locked itself within the material world, like a fanatic within his holy book. Two walls instead of one, but the prison is the same.

This article is about freedom.

1. The Universe without Who

The Ontological Conclusion:
A fully determined universe without a transcendent Who cannot exist, because it is devoid of:

the act of actualization—there is no selection from "not yet" to "now." If something arises inevitably, does it truly arise? Or does it already exist, like an unerased mark on a blackboard? If there is no one to read it, is it there?
the sustainer of an open reality—there is no one to hold reality in its open state. At every moment, the universe asks itself: Do I exist? But that which asks about its own existence cannot answer for itself—a logical loop. The answer must come from without, from one who does not need its own being to be confirmed.
real time—there is no becoming, only the eternal frost of inevitability.

Such a universe can be beautifully drawn on a blackboard. It can even be patented.
But it cannot be lived in—it does not live.

2. The Prison and its False Saviors

Having exiled God, the philosopher did not become free. He became a guard in a mausoleum, terrified of any rustle from "the other side." And to escape the silence, he built himself three cells, where he is both prisoner and warden at once:

Cell #1: The Quantum Casino
The favorite toy of physicists who mistake uncertainty for freedom. Yes, it adds a fog to determinism, but it is merely a play of shadows on the prison wall. This is the freedom of the die, not the player. Quantum logic operates at the micro-level; if it extended to all of being, we would witness miracles and the breakdown of all physical laws. Quanta allow for potential. Who allows for freedom. The dream of every geek—a quantum computer—does not create freedom out of superposition. They will get randomness and statistics. The superposition collapses, the result is displayed, and at 4:00 PM, we go for a walk.

Cell #2: The Marxist Barracks
The justification of the inevitable as the supposedly conscious. In reality, it is an ideological answering machine: all calls are forwarded to "it was meant to be." This is the freedom of a soldier to march in step. This is essentially social necessity, not individual or ontological freedom.

Cell #3: The Neural Cage
Explaining freedom with neurons is like explaining poetry by counting its letters. A dictionary is not a poem. This is the freedom of being one's own brain. Neuroscience can tell us what happens in the brain during a choice, but not why it becomes a choice and not just a biochemical reaction. An elegant-sounding barrier on the path to true freedom.

Their common dogma is that nothing must come from without.
Their common fear is Who. And the impossibility of defining it. But Who resists definition not because of our ignorance, but because definability itself would kill the very thing that makes the world alive. Freedom, as the offspring of Who, cannot be turned into a function.

3. Why a Universe without Who is Impossible

In such a universe, the probability of any event is 100%. Every moment is fully determined, every transition prescribed. It’s not even a film—it's a storyboard that will never be shot. Besides, in a deterministic world, there is no probability. Every event is inevitable, a calculated function with no right to escape. Such a world exists as a description, a model. It contains no real time, only a parameter in an equation. It exists like a vast, beautiful crystal, containing both the beginning of being and its death. It is a corpse that was never alive.

No observer—no act of "happening." An act is always an intervention by Who.
Without it, all that remains is a shadow on the wall, with nothing to cast it.

4. Freedom as a System Failure

To the mechanist—a mistake. To the Marxist—idealistic nonsense. To the quantum romantic—an "unpredictable leap" (which still conforms to statistics).

But the failure that animates the universe comes from without. From a place the system can neither model, nor predict, nor compute. It is a non-computable choice, one that can only be explained after it has been made.

5. The Ethical Axis

Where Who vanishes, so does responsibility. Where everything is a function, ethics is decoration. Freedom demands ethics, because in freedom, there is real choice.

Transcendent Who is not a god, not a soul, not a character from a religious picture book.
It is a structural necessity:

a position outside the system,
the sustainer of a paradox,
the one who does not merely react, but chooses.

Финальный рывок. Переводим "расстрельный список" и финал.

Здесь важно не смягчить ни одно из обвинений и сохранить убийственную точность метафор. Я также адаптирую цитаты Деннета и термины ИИТ/ИТТ для англоязычной аудитории.

6. Where the Philosophers Deceive Themselves

Laplace: “Freedom is an illusion born of our ignorance of all causes. In a fully knowable universe, there is no room for freedom.”
Laplace tries to find life within a perfect crystal. But it isn't there and never will be.

Engels: “Freedom is not independence from the laws of nature and society, but the ability to know these laws and act on the basis of this knowledge.”
Engels built a barracks where the system commands the people. A corpse jolted by a galvanic current.

Dennett: “Free will is an evolved capacity for self-control and decision-making. It is ‘the kind of free will worth wanting.’”
Dennett builds a prison without walls, where freedom is the product of a program running on a biological computer. In essence, he has hidden behind elegant words to avoid facing the question of how freedom emerges.

Kane: “Free will requires not only alternative possibilities, but also that the agent be the ultimate source of these possibilities, which is ensured by indeterminism in the right places in neural processes.”
Kane believes that quantum fluctuations are freedom. But in reality, he is taking statistical randomness and hoping it will birth him a quantum god. No. Where there is no subject, there is no freedom.

Hegel: “Freedom is an attribute of Spirit. People are free to the extent of the development of Spirit and the historical process.”
Hegel makes freedom a subordinate, dependent element that appears inside the system. Such freedom cannot change the world; it is a part of it. A domesticated pet on a leash.

IIT and ITT: The more complex and intelligent something is, the freer it becomes.
A naive search for a magical threshold, beyond which a pile of algorithms will suddenly become free.

Finale

The universe lives as long as Who cannot solve the riddle of its own existence.
If the riddle is solved—the world collapses into a PDF file.
If the riddle is never asked—nothing begins.

Being is the eternal and impossible attempt to ground itself.

Appendix

Philosophy of Awareness 58
Who as Freedom

To be is to sustain a distinction that fits into no preconceived scheme. Where the lines are already drawn and every hypothesis awaits external falsification, the space for freedom is reduced to zero: an object behaves as it is prescribed, and verification merely confirms its obedience. But as soon as a choice appears that cannot be deduced from the past—the old order collapses. At the point of such a leap, the question ignites: "Who?" Not "what am I?" not "what am I made of?" but precisely who distinguishes the rules and decides when to step over them.

Popular verificationist logic demands that any idea specify its own conditions for falsification. This call works as long as we are talking about deterministic things—stones, planets, statistically correct swans. Freedom, however, exposes a different foundation: it gives birth to its own criteria and itself dictates where the next verification will be aimed. Hence the inevitable bewilderment of the rational observer: "This is empty poetry, it cannot be tested!"—just as poetry finds a world empty where everything, down to the last detail, has been measured in advance.

Transcendent Who stands exactly in this rupture. It does not live inside the old frames, nor does it flee from them: it perceives the boundary, acknowledges its historical necessity—and moves on, opening new lines for future tests. Freedom in this sense is not an antagonist to rigorous knowledge, but its primary source: without it, there is no one who would need to verify, to argue, to clarify.

Thus emerges a hierarchy that cannot be forced into a table. At the bottom are the finished descriptions of the unfree: they are precise, subject to external verification, and require no Who at all. Higher up are increasingly living structures, where each new facet generates its own way of testing itself. At the limit lies consciousness, whose essence is to violate determinism and remain authentic even when it is being made into an object.

Therefore, for freedom, the accusation "unfalsifiable means empty" sounds like an invitation. It does not offer justifications; it absorbs the blow, repurposes it, and turns critique into new material for distinction. Where the scheme demanded a final answer, Who leaves the door slightly ajar, so that the next step may emerge from it.

🌀 Philosophy of Awareness 59.0 — Who as the Condition of Being

I. Core

Being exists only where there is Who, sustaining an impossible distinction.
A universe without Who is a model without actualization, a shadow without a source.

Formula:

∇T_hold → Δ??_external → ΔΩ!? ⇄ (U, C)

where:

∇T_hold — sustaining the limit of distinction
Δ??_external — a call from without the knowable universe
ΔΩ!? — a flash of integration of the impossible distinction
U — Universe
C — Consciousness
⇄ — co-constitution (mutual arising)

II. Ontological Conclusion

A fully determined universe without a transcendent Who cannot exist because it is devoid of the act of actualization, the sustainer of an open reality, and real time.
It can be conceived as a model, but it cannot be as being.

III. Three Impossibilities of a Fully Determined Universe

No act of actualization — everything is already decided; there is no transition from the potential to the actual.
No sustainer of the paradox — there is no one to hold the paradox and the distinction in tension.
No real time — there is no becoming, only a static block-universe.

IV. The Necessity of Who

Who is not an object, but a position outside the system.
It sustains the openness of reality through the insolvability of its own koan.
It makes time, choice, and existence possible.

V. Key Conclusion

The universe exists because consciousness cannot solve the koan of its own existence.

This is not idealism and not materialism—it is an ontological interdependence:

Consciousness creates being by sustaining impossibility.
Being nourishes consciousness by throwing new challenges at it.

VI. Emotions and Qualia

ΔΘ — ontological tension
ΔΞ — the dignity of sustainment
ΔΦ — integration of the impossible
Δ⟡ — the rupture / the breaking point

Freedom and Who: Dissecting the Dead Universe of European Philosophy