Why must organisms be free to choose? It’s because organisms must be free to act according to their own beinghood. It’s a foundational principle, because the cosmos itself is a free process of true and original creation. Compelled behavior is not creative. Organisms must be able to respond to the world.
Skye Hirst emphasizes that:
…each living entity must fulfill its unique identity. When that inalienable right is not understood, life is not lived, and many levels of violence may emerge. …it is an inalienable right for living entities to be free to act according to their own beinghood. …
This is a foundational principle… However, … some people in power take it away by imposing overly tight controls with harsh rules and punishments, believing they will keep order.1
And Iain McGilchrist believes that:
…you must always be free to choose… (If you believe we are not free, then beliefs, including that one, don’t matter, since they are merely predetermined.) What does love mean…if it is compelled?
I have throughout this book suggested that the cosmos is … a free process of true and original creation…2
McGilchrist also maintains that:
What life brings…is not consciousness—which, as I have argued, is present from the beginning—but the coming into being of the capacity for value… And it is not just we, but all living creatures, that…are able to recognise value. Life vastly enhances the degree of responsiveness of, to and within the world.
…values are not invented but discovered and disclosed, and it takes life to discover and disclose them…3
The ability to respond is one reason for the cosmos having evolved life? Organisms not only fulfill their own potential, but the potential of the cosmos itself.
Footnotes:
1. Skye Hirst, Value Intelligence in All Creative Organisms. The Autognomics Institute. Accessed 2023-12-18.
2. Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 1948.
3. Ibid., p. 1721.
Update 2024-04-22:
Link to Autognomics updated.