What could possess me to make another post so quickly? An epiphany. A revelation. Many years in the making. The adjusted belief that perhaps freedom does exist, but it is simply so very rare.
In the beginning, about when I was in high school, I started to doubt the ideas of free will. More specifically, the idea of an effect without a cause. I would play Dungeons & Dragons with my friends, and I considered the randomness of rolling a die. When one throws the cube, it bounces around before settling down with one of its six faces showing up toward the person. The epitome of random. But is it really?
In high school, I took physics classes, and perhaps it was due to my novel education that I considered the situation carefully. Were I to know the precise velocity that the die was released, the effects of the atmosphere on the cube as it flew through the air, the imperfections in the surface as it struck down, the coefficients of friction, and all of the various minutia of the events, using a bit of math I could probably predict which face would end up showing. Sure, to know all of these details may not be feasible; I am merely human with limited capacities. But if I could have somehow acquired all of this knowledge, I feel quite confident I could do it. I could predict this random event.
But that becomes a contradiction, does it not? Part of what is baked into the definition of random is that it is unpredictable. To be truly random, no amount of knowledge should ever be sufficient to perform such a calculation. Certainly there is a conflict here. Either my idea is incorrect, or there are not as many random events in our universe as I believed. In fact, what if there are no random events at all?
I’ve been working on computers for most of my life. Computers can generate random numbers, can’t they? Well, as it turns out, no they cannot. The algorithms used by computers to provide seemingly random information can be exceedingly creative, running up against the feasibility concern I’ve raised above. But the results are still not truly or purely random. The use of seemingly unpredictable events from the outside environment (the passage of time, the manner in which I move my mouse, the choice and patterns I employ when utilizing my keyboard, etc) are called entropy and are used to seed the random number generators in our favorite electronic devices. It’s random, but really, it’s not.
There is a marked difference between something that is entirely unpredictable because no amount of knowledge could ever be acquired to predict a result, and something that could be predicted given enough time and effort. The question I posed to a philosophy group this past summer was to suggest that were I God, with an omniscient and omnipotent nature, the feasibility issue might be overlooked. God, I said, could predict these unpredictable events. Unfortunately for me, the suggestion of being God simply overshadowed any attempt at a reasonable discussion after that point.
However, this is the point I am making. For something to be truly random, even God would not be able to predict the outcome. If God could predict the outcome, then it isn’t truly random. Does true randomness exist in our universe? Or does everything bow down to the law of causality, with every single effect being caused by some other event? It seems impossible for us to ever determine such a thing.
If I exist in a hard deterministic universe, where all things follow causality, then there seems to be another very serious problem. There are other things I cherish and value that seem impossible. True creativity seems impossible as well; anything I may want to call creative is simply the reorganization and reassembly of other past things. Perhaps I might want to include the idea of accidents promoting creativity, but as with the previous discussion of randomness, accidents are simply expected events that may not feasibly be predicted either.
Freedom is another such thing. I am speaking of the sort of freedom that includes unpredictability as part of its description. The sort of freedom that I assume God would have, and that I hope I too have. The free will that allows me to break out of a purely deterministic universe by injecting something like an uncaused cause into the mix. If true randomness and true creativity cannot be, then neither can true freedom it seems.
I told my own mother my discovery one day, telling her that I could not believe in free will. Fate, I said, must be how things operate (using the term as I wasn’t aware of the term deterministic at the time). Her response was both passionate and quite surprising to me. “Go step in front of a moving bus,” she said, “if what you say is true, then you will not be harmed.” I was shocked. Of course I would be harmed I told her, but the discussion simply became ridiculous. I could not, for the longest time, understand why she had suggested such a thing.
Later, I realized that what she was suggesting wasn’t quite the same thing as I am discussing here. For her, I think I sounded pompous and arrogant. Like perhaps I felt I had divine protection and influence, or some other equally unlikely blessing. I think I understood the reactions Joe Bauers in Idiocracy was receiving from people after having been frozen for 500 years. Like Joe, I was not trying to impress or sound special. I was simply stating things as I understood them. Communications can be quite challenging at times.
As a result of that interaction with my own mother, I decided it would be best to broach the subject differently going forward. I would say that I don’t believe in free will, but I am open to the possibility. If ever someone was able to convince me of the possibility, I would take the argument seriously.
Fast forward now to the years of the pandemic. Marvel releases the television show Loki. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there is a multiverse. That is, there is not one universe but many. There is not one me, but many, each just a little bit different than the others. In each case, the differences are typically caused by my exercising of my free will. When an event occurs whereby I can choose between more than one option, in truth I actually choose ALL options. Each option I choose forks the universe into another parallel universe. In one of these universes I chose the vanilla ice cream, but in another I chose chocolate.
One issue I found with the show was that there seemed not to be as many Nexus events (these free will events that fork the timeline) as I would have expected. After all, I am faced with numerous free will choices every day. Possibly each hour, minute, or even second. The administration of the timeline, trying to address the multitude of Nexus events caused by me alone would be untenable, let along that there are literally billions upon billions of other individuals with free will causing as many other Nexus events across time and space. So, in the show, why are there only a few at a time? The Time Variance Authority (TVA) seems pretty calm, simply sending out their teams occasionally to address these problem events.
The show never addresses my concern, but I have a theory: perhaps the reason Nexus events are so rare is that free will is not so prevalent as I would like to think. What if I am not expressing a free will when selecting between ice cream flavours, as my selection perhaps follows a more predictable structure due to my preferences and past experiences. If this is true, it may even be possible that not all individuals are even capable of expressing a free will. Perhaps free will is an extremely rare occurrence.
The Loki television show may have sparked this thought process, but it has been the immanent release of The Matrix Resurrections that has truly pushed my mind to think about this outside the box. Specifically, not the upcoming film itself, but rethinking about the previous films.
In particular, a person on Reddit posted a question regarding what would happen if two people inside the Matrix were to mate and have offspring. They wondered whether the offspring would be a computer program or somehow connected to a physical human outside the Matrix. Initially I laughed, but then I thought about it, and the question is absolutely brilliant. The answer is both surprising and depressing at the same time.
The Matrix is a simulation. Any individual who connects to the simulation will experience their own personal perspective of the simulation. While the simulation can offer the opportunity for individuals to interact with other individuals within the simulation, ultimately the bulk of any one person’s experience is being provided by the simulation itself. The simulation is what controls the environment and all things that the individual can interact with. If a bird flies by, the simulation will control that bird (unless the bird is an occupant jacked into the simulation, which is likely not occurring very often, especially in the storyline of The Matrix).
The answer to the above question is that any offspring would be a product of the simulation. The offspring would be a program, or part of the simulation’s program. Simply code. Similarly, if a physical baby human is born and immediately connected to the simulation, the simulation itself will have to provide virtual parents and all the other necessary elements to attend to the new life. Even if one thinks for a moment that those running the simulation might decide to take a moment to try and find appropriately similar parents or children to connect to the strange virtual relationship, aside from the most ridiculously complicated procedure that would render the simulation untenable, they would be mistaken. If the point of the Matrix is to sedate the occupants of the simulation in order to facilitate leaching energy off those occupants, a process attempting to maintain the connections between the occupants in this manner would use up all the available energy acquired in the process. It wouldn’t make any sense, because it is unreasonable. It isn’t feasible.
In other words, most of the “players” in the simulation must necessarily be controlled by the simulation and not be occupants. What is often refereed to in games as Non Player Characters or NPCs. There would be far more NPCs in any simulation than individuals connected to it. In fact, it would even make sense for there to be only one individual to be in simulation, with ALL other individuals being NPCs. To be in simulation is to enter into a sort of solipsism.
To further expand on this situation, consider the possibility that I am in simulation presently. It has been suggested that if a civilization develops the capacity to perform ultra realistic simulations, they are likely to run many, many such simulations. And if there are so many simulations in existence, the likelihood is quite high that I am within one of these simulations. To have so many simulations seems quite similar to the description of a multiverse.
If the probability is high that I am in simulation, then it is similarly high that any individual I encounter is an NPC. In fact, yes, it is also possible I am such an NPC as well. In any case, even if I am not an NPC, there are still going to be an incredibly high number of NPCs in this universe I find myself in. I could possibly be the only non NPC as well.
Finally, if I make the assumption that an NPC will NOT have free will, then I can now explain why free will would be so incredibly rare. With so few non NPCs in existence, even across so many simulated universes, the number of Nexus events in the Loki television show would be quite small and very manageable. And in my “real world” that I occupy right this moment, I can provide a reasonable explanation as to why free will itself would be so incredibly rare, to the point that it may not even exist.