Here is the etiology of delusions of freedom.  We are born safe and snug in a very simplified world of very gradually revealed mysteries.  At first, none of the data shared with us seem to conflict, and all is well.  We imitate sounds we hear as infants, verbalize all wants as kids, whisper to ourselves as teens, repeat the sound of our parents voices (in our heads) as young adults, and eventually all the voices, wisdom, idioms, and “rules” of truth from the books, people, and knowledge we acquire converge into one single inward consciousness, completely segregated from the external world.  But during this psychological development from embryonic clones to individualistic birth, we begin to encounter paradoxes which may present strong truths that threaten previously incorporated (but weaker) arguments or fairy tales that helped us sleep soundly.  A few of the more fundamental assumptions may even be mere convenient lies that lubricate social integration and socioeconomic equilibrium.

If you are fortunate and resolve these crises without exaggerated deconstruction (backing up to point zero), or support network trauma, your inner world becomes far more universal and real than the external material world, though it remains subject to empirical validations in some respects.  And even though your inner world has no parts that transcend or do not otherwise derive from physical reality, it nevertheless has fewer self-contradictions and hypocrisies, if you are more committed to honest methods of finding truth and admitting errors, than to saving face and blindly defending a position.  Although you cautiously avoid exaggerated claims of certainty, you are not too cowardly to admit your own potential for bias and mistakes.  A healthy and active imagination excitedly probes many possible theories and while sadly it may sadly admit those things less probable it never stops dreaming for what is still possible.  But not everyone is so fortunate to bravely exist in a world so uncertain.  For some of us, we are still tightly clinging to the supportive web of self-identification with the external.  Rather than honor our heritage from a respectful distance, we find that we have no distinct sense of self beyond it.

For these unfortunate souls the magic of Peter Pan is very different indeed from the supernatural power of the hallowed spiritual realm.  Reverence for tradition demands that questions be silenced whenever the sacred stories are told.  And all that we are is still but a mere series of group affiliations, peer reference group associations, and temporal conflations of situational coincidences.  It’s poor form to stand beyond the first two mundane deviations and certainly poor sportsmanship to break protocol with ones ancestral customs.  But what if those customs no longer serve the “public good” so well, such as when the public is no longer as homogenized and uni-vocal.  And what if literacy enables more individually tailored practices which suite personal preferences for understanding and even self-expression?  What you more often then encounter are intellectual grave-sites where battles fizzle fast between officially sanctioned public values and victimless behavioral practices.  May the strongest emotion win, and reason be silent.

Thus compunctions to defend our inner world (the self) may at times be a result of internalizing principles that conflict one with another.  But that is not freedom.  That is self-enslavement and that is why the delusion of freedom is a delusion instead of an emergent property resulting from a strong sense of one’s own internal moral and rational compass.  It’s a fear of failure in the face of certainty when answering questions that demand answers but have no more universal applicability than that we all eventually ask them.  The delusion of freedom is a tragic paradox for usually those most likely to claim science less useful in service to one’s acquisition of knowledge (relative to supernatural sources), are also those most likely to have surrendered their ability to reason about freedom itself by virtue of blindly accepting explanations based on magic.