[jordan0day]

I think your first sentence is really interesting & insightful, kind of treating "true" freedom as a sort of absolute zero -- that is, a never-actually-reachable ideal.

I feel like free will doesn't have much to do with the kind of freedom we're talking about, though. If some other human being (or group) has the ability to make you do something you don't want to do, that's a problem of freedom, not free will. (After all, you could decide not to do that thing and suffer the consequences).

Free will is much more about things that you have no ability whatsoever to actually make that decision in the first place, whether because of the manipulative hand of some supernatural force, or via some radical rationalist explanation of decision making.

[koningrobot]

I see at least two implications of what I said, one being that freedom is an absolute zero, the other being that shifting freedom around is a zero-sum game. Maybe these two are related in some game-theoretic way, I'm not sure. The only fundamentally productive way of obtaining freedom is by getting more control over our environment, i.e., technological progress.

I understand the distinction you're making between freedom and free will; I mentioned it because the compatibilist notion of free will is what you're calling freedom here. But yeah, it's probably not too relevant to the original discussion.