The Value In Free

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Where we learn that unattached and independent aren’t the only things to consider.

I’ve rewritten the first sentence of this essay so many times that I’ve now decided that this is it – here it is, the first sentence. It encompasses every level of my frustration – often feeling I was on the precipice of a revelation while simultaneously rolling my eyes at what felt obvious – as I dug into this friggin’ four-letter-word: free

Where I’ve landed (for the time being 🫥) is that this (admittedly, self-churned) angst about the word free is so incredibly personal precisely because it is rooted in my own experience with the word. And I’d bet the same would go for you. Oh, the baggage we carry through the years.

Free isn’t one of those words that you gotta pause before using it in a sentence because you need to deeply think about its meaning. It’s an elementary basic word. Free is all about having autonomy and not being confined or constrained; there’s a sense of space and openness about it. In mathematics, it’s defined quite similarly – it’s still about independence and having no constrictions – but there’s also a constant association to be aware of what the value is of what is free as well as how that value is determined. Which is why I’m proclaiming that this word just brings up all the f e e l i n g s.

WTAF? What kind of math’centric essay is this?

On its own, when anything is labeled as free in mathematics, it’s saying that that “anything” 😉 is unattached and that it’s independent. This whole free thing goes a step further in algebraic equations when the phrase “free variables” comes up. If a variable is free, it’s not only unattached, but it is sooooo unattached, it is soooo alone, that it has no identity of its own and, even more pointedly, it has no value. It’s value is TBD. Yeah, the variable exists but it’s essentially a placeholder till it can attach itself and gain meaning – and, subsequently, value – in relation to what is next to it (in an equation).

Understanding what this says about the word free is the first thing that made me twitch.

As it’s presented in that equation above,
that free variable is un-valuable.
Whereas free in real life is in-valuable.

Right? Gaaah.

There’s been a gazillion times where I’ve waxed poetic about mathematical relationships. How we can gain knowledge from what we learn about the outcomes of their different paths and consider if that could be applicable in our own real world relationships. But stripping down the positivity of an object being free to the point where it has to have a relation in order for that object to possess any iota of value, well, not only could I see how that could be applicable in a real world relationship (and where it has been in the past [wow, this baggage is heavy]), but I also find that concept to be incredibly depressing.

You see, to me, the most attractive quality about free is the non-reliance part of it, inclusive of being unattached and independent. That being free doesn’t require any bit of dependence in order for value – any value – to exist. These free variables were free in (real-world) name only.

Okay, back to the mathy stuff.

Have you ever heard of free particles? What I enjoy about them is that they’re not only independent of the other particles in their midst but they, unlike those algebraic variables, don’t need to be partnered up in order to be defined, in order for them to gain an identity. Their very existence has a value.

Take Alice – she of that mystical place known as Wonderland – who is given a new adventure of a scientific sort as portrayed in the fantastic(al) book, Alice in Quantumland. At this moment in the tale, Alice is at The Heisenberg Bank so she may speak to the Bank Manager who is “in charge of the distribution of energy loans to all the virtual particles out there.” She asks him for an energy loan and wants to know why she can’t see them 😆 before she ‘purchases’ it. 😂

“Well, you see,” replied the Manager, “in order for a particle to exist properly, so that it can be a free particle and able to move around and be observed normally and so on, it has to have, at the very least, a certain minimum energy which we call its rest mass energy. These poor virtual particles do not have even that energy. Most of them have no energy at all, so they do not really exist. Fortunately for them, they can get a loan of energy here at the Bank and this allows them to exist for a little while.”

_{“Alice in Quantumland: An Allegory of Quantum Physics”
by Robert Gilmore (pg. 14)}

Ha! This “rest mass energy” is all about the energy, well, within. In the case of a free particle, it is the energy that exists within itself, the mass of itself, in its immobile state of being, when it is At Rest – as opposed to any energy external to it and in its immediate environment, energy that might eventually affect force of some sort upon that particle and contribute to its let-us-call-it movement.

Again, I say, “Huh.”

I take this all to mean that a particle can only have the moniker of free when it is – well – when it is in a moment of introspection. When it is quiet. Still. Meditative? That all sounds like a positive state of independence as well as being unattached. It also seems apparent that there is value that exists in a free particle, since it has that little bit of energy. They’re actual, not virtual.

How about when the word free is associated with other states of being? Besides reflecting on the mathematical core of the word free – unattached & independent – I think we can agree that there is a feeling of, well, freeness in those moments when we are in control of something, when we have power that has some magnitude.

This kind of power grip is the genesis of unattached and independent expression, aka Free Speech.

By several ingenious experiments, [Melvin Seeman] has shown that persons who feel powerless do not learn as much about their environment as those who believe they have power to control events. He has shown that persons with a sense of powerlessness show lack of interest in international affairs (1966) and a lack of political knowledge (1971 a,b) and Ransford (1968) has shown that students with a sense of powerlessness are more likely to engage in violence, in outbreaks of protest like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley.
_{“Power and the Structure of Society” by James S. Coleman
(pg. 53)}

Again, I say, “huh.” When people are not confined or constrained in their access to and deliverance of expression and speech, they’re instinctually curious to know more. But if your access to information is severely regulated, you’re actively being stifled. Powerless and un-free. That would suck. I don’t want a mute button attached to me.

A totally different approach to considering the concept of free has to do with the passage of time. I’m talking about the action of Free Recall when you’re engaged in a memory retrieval task.

The ‘tip of the tongue phenomenon’ illustrates the nature of one common problem in free recall, in that we often have only partial access to information that we’re trying to retrieve. By comparison, cued recall is where we present a prompt (such as a category, or the first letter of the word) in order to retrieve a certain piece of information. …Cued recall tends to be somewhat easier for respondents than free recall. This may be because we’re providing more support and context for the individual – i.e. we are actually doing some of the ‘memory work’ for them in providing these cues. It should be noted that cues can be useful in retrieving information, but they can also introduce distortion and bias…
_{“Memory: A Very Short Introduction” by Jonathan K. Foster
(pg. 51)}

This usage of the word free is very true to the math definition (Unattached! Independent!), so much so that it then highlights how free is, in this case, not always a positive thing. Sometimes attachment (in the form of context) and independence (in the form of support) can help to stave off the enemies of valuable recollection / reporting, those sketchy characters of distortion and bias. I’d say this particular usage of free is, indeed, unvaluable.

What do you think about Free Time? I love it and I receive so much goodness from it on the regular that and I intentionally make it happen in my life, consciously giving up opportunities presented to me that could be beneficial in the long-term but, yeah, I want that in-the-short-term reward.

Of course people who use time-saving services are going to be more satisfied. These are people who have enough money to pay someone to cook and deliver dinner for them. 

But, as the researchers found out, it was not about the money. Millionaires who paid to avoid the busy trap tended to be happier than millionaires who did not. 

And it was the same for people living on minimum wage – happiness found those who used some of their scarce income to improve their schedules. Dunn’s team had uncovered a convincing correlation between greater life satisfaction and fewer to-dos.

_{“Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less” by Leidy Klotz
(pg. 130)}

Free Gift is not so free. It also rings back to, and manipulates, those math descriptors of value, independence, and unattached. Gross.

But then! There’s one term that starts with the word free that seems to pop up with more and more frequency of late. Everyone, please welcome to the stage: Free Will!

Talking about ‘will’ in this context is in reference to ability and/or capacity. So, inline with our math-imbued use of the word free, Free Will would be about possessing an ability and/or capacity to perform an action independently and unattached, with no support.

Is this particular Will un- or in- valuable?

At this point, as I was going further in on all-things-free in the context of how it’s perceived in mathematics, well, it buoyed that initial depressive moment that I had had. Yet, as this white lady who’s writing this essay further understood that free could mean something not 100% positive in real life, it also became clearer and clearer how little I’d considered that the word free may have always had a complicated (in the real-world) definition for other folks, especially from different backgrounds and experiences than my own.

And so, now, we’ve arrived at the dénouement of my whole ding-dong prattle on the word free.

In the early 19th century, mathematician Adolphe Quételet was a bit hyper-focused on (what we refer to today as) all things stats & analytics, the elements of what we now classify as data science.

Here’s where Free Will comes in.

I’ve referred to deterministic and stochastic systems before, where the former is a system whose outputs are consistent as long as the inputs are consistent; if this, then that, and so it shall be. The latter considers the possibility of inconsistency, the possibility of something random occurring at the input point which, to varying degrees, would then alter the output.

We all exist in a stochastic system. Therefore:

From the outset, statistical approaches to social science were controversial. As statistics looked ever more likely to reveal the supposed natural laws of society, the question of what that implied for individual human behaviour became impossible to ignore. This may quite reasonably be the first question in the minds of those encountering the new ‘physics of society’ for the first time. The debate that raged (and it did rage) in the nineteenth century can usefully inform us about the arguments.
_{“Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another” by Philip Ball
(pg. 88-89)}

This is where Quételet started getting a bad feeling in his tummy. That physical reaction we get when the internal signs are flashing “Caution, do not proceed.” If his work was interpreted as conclusive blanket statements about swaths of humans and their behavior, what assumptions would people take as fact about society as a whole? Would individual behavior be looked at as blips of action that were only temporarily going off course? Was everyone just cogs in the machine? And what did this all mean in regards to Free Will?

How much freedom do we have in shaping our destiny, whether collectively or individually? At a detailed, high-resolution level, we may have great freedom in determining events into the near future, but at a coarse-grained, bigger-picture level where we deal with very long timescales, life may be more deterministic than we think.

_{“Scale” by Geoffrey West
(pg. 56)}

I’d never considered the concepts of unattached, independent, the value of and the dependence on – or not – of relations when defining the word free IRL in the same space as the subject of determinism, even when talking about Free Will. Where determinism eschews all things maybe, or probably, or even statistically (since it resides in the realm of absolute) and the textbook definition of Free Will is to not only be able to make choices but to actually be able to possess discernment between those choices, there’s then an obvious conflict of distinction.

This is what Quételet had sensed and it’s why ethics and the invisible carbon-monoxide fog of bias had entered the discussion around his statistical work. Was saying that something was ‘statistically likely’ the same as saying it was certain? And then decisions, especially decisions associated with law & order, could be implemented all because some particular stats were used to define the actions of an entire society?

Free Will was getting smooshed into the time-out corner, though it was appearing to be the time-out corner for only those who were not a part of the majority, that which whose members were already in possession of the power in society.

Free hasn’t meant the same thing for everyone in a really long time. If ever.

Phew. OK. Well, I have one last free word for ya.

The suffix ‘-dom’ refers to a state of being or a group of people that encompass whatever base word that that suffix is attached to. It is the dominion of that word.
So,
Kingdom. Boredom. And, yeah, Freedom.

I wasn’t clear on how the math attributes of free applied here. How do I think of this word as a dominion or state of being of something that’s unattached, independent and… unvaluable?

We can make a distinction between independence and freedom in this way: independence is the sense of being functionally separate, wholly unto oneself, whereas freedom is the ability to be that separate self within the context of other independent selves… It only becomes about relationship if it is interrupted. We might say that during the development of independence, the child needs the support of others but has no wish yet to be influenced by their parallel needs.
_{“Hakomi Mindfulness – Centered Somatic Psychotherapy” by Halko Weiss
(pg. 83)}

I very much like this distinction between independence and freedom.

The more that I’ve read about the mathematical meaning of the word free, the more aware I’ve become on how the word reaches into what we do, every day; free speech and free press, free recall, free time, free will and of course 🇺🇸 freedom 🇺🇸 – and how I, then, want to honor the full expanse of what it means to be free in all ways possible. To be independent and unattached and to have value, even in those quiet low-energy moments, because… it (and I and you each) exist(s).

What I’m holding on to from all of this is (surprise!) how & where relationships play a part in free. Where to be free there can be a reliance or even dependence on another is ok if it is only needed as support in particular insistences, not as a constant presence in order to bring -even lift up – the identity of those in the same sphere of existence.

Much like I took an obscene amount of time writing the first sentence, I’m having a challenge in the here & now concluding this essay. So, I’m going to be cheeky and take a cue from my buddy, A to the Q(uételet), and allow myself to not be required to deliver some tidy summation about free and purport that I could possibly know what it means, in absolute certainty, to each and every one of us. Let’s keep this convo going, por favor.

Thanks math, you’re the best.