A human need to be free?

Notwithstanding its relativity and the impossibility of attaining it, humans (nominally at least) have striven for freedom throughout their history—they want to be free. Millions have died willingly in the name of this cause, making this a question that cannot be ignored. Is there a human need to be free? Why do most (or at least certain) humans claim that they need to be free? As has been seen, humans need to augment their information processing. In fact, each and every human needs to augment his or her own information processing, to constantly process new information for as long as he or she lives (see §05.01.02). However, humans strive towards an imagined, not a real end, because needs are unsatisfiable. Imagination is, therefore, critical: humans need to be able to imagine that further, new processing is possible for them that may satisfy their needs (even though this is, however, never actually the case). (This does not necessarily have to be entirely new or never-before-heard-of processing; it may well be that the processing already done by others is imagined to be applicable to them as well—comparison being natural to humans.) If they could not imagine that new information processing is possible for them, they would simply stop (reducing themselves to a mechanical increase of their information processing with every new day of their lives). It is therefore humans’ need to augment their information processing that causes (gives rise to) humans’ ability to imagine—and, thus, to be free.

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