Liberté

The morning made a good impression on me with a nice mellow temperature. That was until i looked out of my window and saw a not so nice mellow sky. Can't believe i am saying this but i would trade the temp for the vivid blue sky that's a trademark of this place, um, just cause all the fireworks i am expecting tonight! That reminds me i have to concoct my trademark spicy chicken for the la soirée de 4 juillet, but that can wait.

In fact many a prominent countries declared their birth (freedom from Sovereignty) during the very month of July, such as US, Canada or France. Ah, those of you who don't know me, this also happens to be le mois de naissance for me! But i digress. So, what i was wondering about today was the meaning of freedom, the nature of it, and the context it is defined in. To me, the word freedom is rather undefined unless accompanied by a context, and also that it ain't a concept absolu.

So i looked up the definition in the good old Webster. Eh, i decided to skip the net today. I was feeling all professorial, so i hunted down the book from my shelf only to realize that another hunt for magnifying glasses was in order. Zut alors! Anyhow, from what i can tell via a squint, the word surmounts to "The condition or quality of being free" Oh, cool, what's free again? Squint once more, "Having liberty of action or thought".

Now that opens a whole Pandora's box of interpretations and contextual dubiousness. Not to mention that the very meaning of the word invokes a stark contradiction within. To restrain or not to restrain? Your free thought to kill all the pretty girls with shiny straight hair and side partings may mean the end of me and my free thoughts, lol, whatever those may be!

Indeed, in statistics (a pseudo science like life, if i may say so without vexing my statistician colleagues, hehe) degrees of freedom of a fit is inversely proportional to the flexibility you allow for the fit. So in a broad sense, if we were to model a society using people as parameters, more people exercising their free thoughts calls for a society with less degrees of freedom.

But since i am in math, i posit a rather different lens, hehe i am biased but i am right! A phase space angle. Okay, what's that? "A space in which all possible states of a system are represented, with each possible state of the system corresponding to one unique point in the phase space". Loosely, the society is the system and the people are the points. The degree of freedom are rather represented by the axes of this multidimensional space. Ah, now the axes rule the location of the points with the succession of evolving points over time depicting the evolving state of the system. The society as a dynamical system.

Freedom is but an evolving exercise in pursuit of restraint as determined by society's moral axes. Yep, that will do for my definition.

Now i am itching to tell you all about how chaos and strange attractors fit into this theory, but i gotta go cook. So the discourse is over, folks. I am off to make one f**kin good chicken!

A demain, tout le monde!