An Audience Named Imuzen

Gonyaul was experiencing repetitious neglect, bordering on indifference, that seemed calculated. It was obvious his captors were isolating him from all meaningful connections, a sense of freedom and bringing him to the edge of privation for a reason. It would have been quite easy to let him wither away; however, just enough food and water were always made available to keep him merely existing.

To expend resources on him indicated that he held some sort of value. That value was either matching of the meager rations he received, or perhaps there were not many resources to go around in general. If he had to make an educated guess, he leaned more towards that his worth to his captors wasn't that high. There was no way the lady that fought them would have been able to sustain that level of physical exertion without having access to a more sustaining food supply. Of course, there was the chance that making him suffer was part of their agenda; however, why he specifically deserved this was a mystery.

Without access to the outside world, the procession of time had started to blur together into something less measurable. He honestly didn't know what time of the day, or what day of the week, it was anymore. How long had he really been there? The only thing which created a semblance of order was his structured routines for his internal and external actions which were still under his control. It kept him active both physically and cognitively, which were two necessary tools to keep his hope and perseverance alive.

His willpower was under attack and the young Vaux would often escape his prison during meditation and imagination. Initially it was just himself; however, he eventually caught notice of a small mouse that would sometimes make itself present through a crack in one of the stones at the base of the enclosed hut. The little "friend", whom he named Imuzen, started to come more frequently when Gonyaul started leaving crumbs to share. The cost was the mouse had to listen to Gonyaul's discourses; which now that he had an audience were done out loud instead of silently in his head.

Today the mouse caught him contemplating the concept of free will. He drifted into that topic from his determination to figure out if they were all just controlled pawns of the gods or if they actually had some form of choices over their life and the unfolding of the future. The mouse nibbled away at the crumbs while Gonyaul tried to explain his train of thought to the tiny rodent in his native language.

"So Imuzen, if we treat ourselves like we are free and moral individuals with choice, and that we can determine the course of our lives, then we seem to get along better with ourselves, are less anxious and more productive. At least that is what it seems to be like to me. If we treat other people like they're free individuals that are making voluntary choices about how reality is going to come into being and we reward them when they do it properly ... and we discipline them when they don't ... then our relationships with them seem to work for the most part. Now if we predicate our society on the presupposition that each individual human being is capable of doing just that, then we seem to have functional societies.

Pay attention to this next part Imuzen because this is a complicated issue. If we dispense with the idea of free will, then how are we supposed to organize our relationships to ourselves, our interactions with our family and the broader community? I believe strongly that we have free will. We are responsible for our choices. Those choices are constrained in many many ways. I think that there is a slope of free will from free out into the future, to increasingly constrained as the present manifests itself, to when we might think we enter into the realm of deterministic causality at the moment-of-action."

Gonyaul had been talking with his hands with his eyes closed near the end to try and make sense of it all. When he opened his eyes Imuzen was gone. He sighed, "Hope you have a good day out there for me." Gonyaul went back to finish his meditation, trying to make sense of the idea he formulated regarding free will of the future that constrains itself into more deterministic causalities as it nears the exact present moment where actions are disinhibited into existence. He wanted to get a firmer grasp on his thinking so that at his next meditation session he could try and pick apart his argument to the best of his ability.