View source for Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill

= okay, relativity is nice, but do we have free will?? =

<h3 id="intro"><time datetime="2024-12-29T12:27:31Z" style="display: none;">Intro</time></h3>

The simplest way to simulate the Vegeta effect is to roll a 20-sided die.

If you roll a twenty-sided die, you will get one of twenty different numbers, but you will not have any idea which one of those numbers it will be. You may have seen a great quantity of dice in your life. You may think you know everything about dice, enough to begin spouting strange poetry at your tabletop group that any die is as good as any other die because no matter what they look like or what they are made of they all have twenty sides with the same approximate 1-in-20 chance to land on any of them. <i>This die is one of my favorite dice,</i> you might say, <i>and I just know that when I toss it onto the table this die is going to pull through for me and I am going to get a twenty.</i> And then, both surprisingly and unsurprisingly, perhaps very close to nineteen times as unsurprisingly as surprisingly, you see that the die has instead landed on a 2. You really needed that die to land on a 20? Too bad. A simple 20-sided die has thwarted you. A simple polyhedron with no emotions or desires has managed to <i>not cooperate</i>.

This is very curious. We know a die does not <i>think</i>, and we know a die does not <i>want anything</i> or <i>refuse anything</i>. Yet at the same time, if we so much as roll a die, it can certainly feel a lot like social rejection. It can feel as if a die not only does not feel anything toward anyone, but specifically <em>does not care</em> about anyone. It can feel as if a die is somehow actually capable of turning a cold shoulder, or trying to spite a person. Goku cannot Freely Will what Vegeta does, and no one can Freely Will what the die does.

How is it that dice can give such an impression? Is it simply that we anthropomorphize objects and attempt to read everything as if it were a human being? Sometimes even our mental models of human beings do not predict human beings. If it is so difficult to understand the human mind, can we meaningfully say we are <em>correctly</em> projecting human behavior onto the die? Could it be that the last human we thought behaved in a spiteful way did it by accident, or the last human we thought was attempting to help us was actually trying to spite us on purpose? There is always some possibility of such a thing. Are we, battered and damaged by the fatal unpredictability of other humans, futilely searching for <em>better</em> outcomes than a human would give us in a simple unbiased die?

Or could it instead be that <i>a human being is similar to a die</i>, and every time a human being has rejected us it was really just a more complicated macrocosm of the simple process of throwing down a die and receiving a 2?

== Twilight Sparkle has no free will ==

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit;">&gt; random! uncaring! disturbed by no Free Will!
&gt;&gt; What's the point of human existence if it's just a random fluke?

this is a silly question. this is the same question as asking, if Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash are defined characters that act in defined ways, does this mean that _within the defined fictional universe of My Little Pony_, _if we temporarily suspend our disbelief and take it as its own functioning reality_, that they have no Free Will?
no! every episode of the show has to assume they have the ability to have individual wills and to for some reason make one of two decisions in order to properly implement a friendship lesson or fail to properly understand something. it doesn't matter at all whether those wills are "free" in terms of the process of individuals making decisions and learning to make one decision instead of another decision.

[section unfinished]
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== what does it mean to find a Shiny Pidgey? ==

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit;">the topic of Free Will is quite a broad one, which can reach down to ridiculous depths. if we are to examine it properly, it would be a good idea to first get our bearings by falling back to something many times simpler.

when someone boots up a _Pokémon_ game, they will shortly be able to observe the player character (the _Pokémon trainer_) moving through natural areas and randomly encountering any number of magical creatures known as Pokémon. one of the more common Pokémon in the Kanto region is Pidgey, a "tiny bird Pokémon" which vaguely resembles the Japanese Skylark _Alauda arvensis japonica_. Pidgey's back plumage is usually a simple medium brown, but like almost all Pokémon, Pidgey can rarely be found in a Shiny version in which its whole color palette has changed toward a soft, brassy gold. Since the fourth generation of Pokémon games, Shiny Pokémon appear at a rate of 1 in 4,096. a Pokémon game involves a whole lot of random numbers. every time the game needs to generate some kind of unexpected or not-quite-predictable event, such as a Pokémon appearing on an arbitrary grass tile, or a Pokémon using a technique, it picks up a very long seed number, adds it to another long number, and multiplies that by a third long number long enough to overflow the 32- or 64-bit number slot. the Linear Congruential Random Number Generator is a surprisingly simple process. all it actually does is generate a very long series of numbers through a mathematical operation which correlates the previous and next numbers to each other strangely. said another way, the LCRNG is basically just _counting wrong_. we all know how to count by ones: we take the previous number and add 1. we all know how to count by fives: take the previous number and add 5. most of us can probably grasp the concept of counting in a power series by two: multiply the previous number by 2 to get a new power of two. but what would happen if we were to count in a power series by powers of a number that changes each time? that series of numbers wouldn't be as easy to understand as a power series that multiplies numbers by two. if we were to write down a power series multiplying the previous number by the current number of seconds on the closest available clock, and hand it to someone to guess what the function was, that person would probably be fairly baffled, even if they were smart enough to tease out and closely compare all the exponents and realize that all of them were between 1 and 60. but the more amazing thing is, when the results of doing a power series wrong _properly_ are already so hard to understand, we can very nearly get away with replacing the real randomness of the exact moment some particular experimenter looks at the clock with simply dropping the result of the previous calculation in as the power. one might think this would ruin the exercise, and produce a series of numbers that was basically predictable, but if the numbers are big enough and we allow the number slot to overflow and start going around again, the effect of the numbers rolling over is actually rather similar to the movement of the real or virtual "second hand" on the experimenter's clock. the clock goes around predictably at a nice smooth rate of 1 second per second. the large integer address "goes around predictably" at a rate of counting by ones to eventually come back to zero. but when we throw a crazy power series with arbitrary exponents into that otherwise ordinary and predictable integer address, interesting things happen. each multiplication starts to vaguely resemble the act of the human experimenter turning to look at the clock at arbitrary times, intersecting the simple, continuing path of the individual clock with the more complicated path of the individual experimenter and thus distorting the second person's view of the clock through the complex interaction between the motions of two separate, independent things. some very strange and interesting things happen when you count wrong.

tabletop role-playing games are themselves rather strange. when we play a simulation game, simulations so often model the world in terms of die rolls. does anyone ever stop and think for even a moment about exactly why games do this? is it simply because an event can succeed or fail but the game designer does not actually want to construct a complicated model of how something actually happens? this would seem like a decent enough explanation for the 8-bit era of console games — it would probably be ridiculous to expect any kind of simple computer or calculator to truly simulate the physics of whether a Rhydon charging across three-dimensional space could actually hit a Pidgey, so rolling a die is the next best thing. but is this really the actual reason? the total scope of a fictional world and total number of things in it can be vast. when players have gone through and counted them, the _Pokémon_ games alone manage to depict populations containing hundreds of visible people, let alone all the less-visible Pokémon hiding in the grass. isn't it actually very strange that such a simple operation as rolling a die could manage to provide a remotely convincing simulation of such a vast and complex physical world, let alone a fake mathematical die fashioned out of a screwed-up power series? a PRNG is one of the most drastically oversimplified ways we could model a fictional world, and yet they are _everywhere_. how can this be? how can it be that just multiplying a bunch of constrained numbers by themselves or rolling a bunch of dice can begin to produce such a convincing feeling that a player is traveling through the space of a simulated world and _events are happening_?

here is a bold hypothesis about the relationship between reality and fiction: relativity is actually one of the most central processes in all of physics. with respect to the way any human or living being experiences the world, relativity is one of the very first things we all see,  [*wrt]  and any simulated world which so much as simulates relativity will begin to remind us of the outward perception of an individual operating in reality.

we began this chapter, and ended the previous one, with the concept of the _Vegeta effect_ — the phenomenon by which two individual people behaving independently become unpredictable to each other in ways that can become destructive to social relationships or simply frustrating, but in the end this phenomenon happens specifically because people are separate disconnected objects. this "Vegeta" effect of people behaving like twenty-sided dice is by no means specific to the universe of _Dragon Ball_. we could just as easily call it the Shiny Pidgey effect, or the Entei effect; when Entei, Raikou, and Suicune run randomly across the Johto region and only sometimes encounter a trainer, typically then continuing on their way as fast as they can, they embody the process in a slightly different way than any entity that speaks to people, but they are still independently-moving, free-floating objects all the same. the big question that arises is this: what is the relationship between the Vegeta effect and the traditional notion of "free will"? for that matter, what is the relationship between real-life manifestations of the _Vegeta effect_ or _Entei effect_ and dumb mathematical processes such as pseudorandom number generators and twenty-sided dice? does a twenty-sided die have Free Will? are human beings in actuality uncomfortably similar to pseudorandom number generators? do most people even know the material difference between a die and a pseudorandom number generator? could all of us hypothetically be nothing more than a predetermined sequence of numbers and yet not have any way of noticing it because we could never tell Free Will and predetermination apart? how did we ever get from a universe of dumb free-floating objects to self-aware intelligent life?
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=== quantum mechanics for tiny bird Pokémon ===

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit;">if we want to understand the relationship between randomness and the conscious experience of individuals, we need to start small. specifically, it would benefit us to see if we can find the smallest, simplest physical object or process known to exist in our universe that resembles a random number generator — something so small one would think it could not /possibly/ have space for any kind of conscious brain. does such a thing exist? of course it does. near the smallest possible levels of physics, though according to some scientists not quite at the smallest scale of spacetime possible, objects and processes operate according to a set of mathematical rules called _quantum mechanics_.

quantum mechanics is very commonly misunderstood by the general public, and on top of that misunderstood in a number of creative ways. within the world of the SCP Foundation, an "unfiction" collaborative writing project put together by thousands of different authors, a report on a phenomenon restructuring all organic life into new iron-based cellular structures (SCP-6217) features a researcher claiming that because quantum mechanics exists they will never lose their ability to make decisions and turn into a mindless machine. anyone who actually knows what quantum mechanics is would know this particular claim is an empty and ineffective statement. even if there are quantum processes going on in the body and brain of the researcher, there are also quantum processes going on in every single piece of inanimate matter which has never had a thought or made a decision at all; if a researcher were to try to use quantum mechanics to defend themself from The Broken God, they would more or less be walking right into its hands and into the same kinds of random mindless stochastic processes as the ones throughout nature it had already been claiming. quantum mechanics does not, in and of itself, provide any particular medium for consciousness. it is simply too unreliable, and too small. in any human brain, there are particular reliable structures such as neurons and glia. quantum mechanics is almost precisely defined as the uncertainty any of those particular brain cells or connections will be there. if a cell suddenly vanished from your brain and turned into a bunch of random liquid or proteins, do you think that would aid your ability to be aware of your surroundings? and yet, this is exactly the kind of thing quantum-mechanical processes do. at tiny scales far smaller than a brain cell, quantum interactions basically take one kind of fundamental particle and swap it out for another and hope the rest of the universe doesn't notice. the study of quantum mechanics, in general, deals with such things as how atoms manage to consistently stay atoms when the quarks inside them are constantly re-dividing themselves and swapping their material with the rest of the surrounding universe. one slightly concerning fact that physicists have learned is that atoms _don't always succeed_ at staying together, and in fact, one reason that neutrons decay is that atoms can rarely leak quark material through a process known as the weak interaction. a down quark can leak part of its overall mass and energy into a W-minus boson, becoming an up quark, before the W boson then changes into an electron and an electron antineutrino. put in simple terms, quarks are never solid, and are really a kind of interacting, fluctuating process. any three quarks bound into a proton or neutron are constantly re-dividing into a new set of quarks and gluons, and connected with this overall instability, sometimes a particular group of quarks simply begins losing "quark stuff" entirely. it would thus certainly appear from the example of fundamental forces such as the weak interaction that randomness and the ability of individuals to exert an individual will are separate things, where randomness does not necessarily /entail/ the ability to have control over one's body.

of course, if we look more closely at the differences between different scales of the universe, we will begin to realize that an airtight description of known quantum-mechanical processes at the small scale is by no means the full picture. at larger scales, other kinds of phenomena or effects begin to appear which although they are _bizarrely similar_ to quantum mechanics are also in some ways different. the Vegeta effect or Entei effect we have named earlier is one of these larger-scale quantum-like processes.

of course, all of this talk of quantum-mechanical mathematics or quantum-like logical models can begin to get rather esoteric if we get too far away from the scales of everyday experience people are generally familiar with. in order to better explore these concepts in a way that is easily understandable, it may be best if we return to the example of Shiny Pidgey.

how does a Pokémon professor prove that Shiny Pokémon are real? certainly, an empirical approach would get at least part of the way — if you can show someone a Shiny Pokémon, then you do have a solid piece of evidence that there have ever been Shiny Pokémon period. but what if you wanted to know _why_ Pokémon are Shiny? given nothing more than an outside description of a single Shiny Pokémon, a researcher would need to look awfully closely at how that Pokémon emerges from and interacts with the rest of the world.

say a Pokémon researcher collects over 5,000 Pidgeys, and eventually finds a Shiny. this experiment would illustrate not just the existence of that one Shiny Pokémon or a Shiny form of Pidgey, but the _entire process_ of Shiny Pokémon existing and coming into being only occasionally — the fact there is just one Shiny Pidgey next to all the other normal Pidgeys _indirectly gives us information about the Shiny Pidgey_ and the underlying processes which lead to the existence of Shiny Pidgey. this is more or less the same way real-world quantum physicists demonstrate how it is that quantum-scale interactions lead up to the more stable kinds of matter and physical behaviors we observe at larger scales — scientists observe physical phenomena that are visible from the outside, and essentially work from the outside in. first, some strange set of observations will be collected that happens not to match previous predictions. then, scientists will attempt to find a specific physical process they can study from the outside which they predict to have been produced through certain quantum interactions. then, they will build some kind of apparatus such as the Large Hadron Collider or the IceCube neutrino detector in order to collect what amounts to aggregated information about events that are usually too small and unlikely to observe individually. often, researchers arrive with their model of what quantum interactions "should" produce and gain information when the actual results for what is produced do not match the results side for the processes they predicted to be happening, but either way, physicists generally must build models of what they will observe in experiments based on the kinds of outwardly-observable arrangements or behaviors of things they actually observe in experiments. this process of aligning real-world phenomena to theoretical models of what is happening beneath them can be termed _scientific phenomenology_. _phenomenology_ itself has existed as a concept in any number of different philosophies, but it is important to make the distinction that different forms of phenomenology are designed to serve different purposes and contrasted with any of these /other/ phenomenological philosophies, any particular scientific method operates from a particular conception of phenomenology which has proved itself useful to science and the purpose of interpreting and designing experiments.

if one wishes to study and detail the workings of the universe, phenomenology is one of the easier parts of the task versus the actual process of finding out what kinds of interactions might be going on beneath the surface. anyone familiar with the actual findings of quantum mechanics would immediately understand this — looking at the sheer number of equations and kinds of interactions quantum physicists have described, it would seem as if the sheer amount of complexity that gets casually tossed into irrelevance when going from lower scales to higher scales is staggering. of course, what somebody considers "complex" is relative. if we were to look at all fundamental particles in particular locations as individuals, the universe would seem astoundingly complex, while if we were to look at fundamental particles and fundamental particle interactions as mere repetitions of the same basically-identical things, and quantum-mechanical equations as a _summary_ of the whole universe, the quantum scale might instead begin to seem simple. atoms are complicated. there are hundreds of different atoms, and when they combine into new compounds we cannot always predict how they will behave. the quantum scale, however, does not present anywhere near as many possibilities. once you know about all the quantum interactions whose effects can be detected in everyday life, the overall shape the quantum scale presents to the larger world becomes easily intelligible, like we effectively know everything that could possibly happen down inside that level and at the end of the day the whole existence of quantum mechanics has become more or less predictable and prosaic. if you specifically look at quantum mechanics from the angle of the macroscopic world governed by the patterns of classical physics, and ask, "if I'm classical, what does quantum mechanics mean for /me/?" it would begin to seem that despite any ongoing theoretical problems of fuzzy-looking particles and difficulties in measuring things without greatly changing them by physically bumping into them, quantum-mechanical interactions are really not that dissimilar from any other physical process such as rolling wheels or chemical reactions, and not truly much more strange or mysterious than anything larger.

if it happens to be the case that the one most illustrative example in our universe of what /should/ amount to a physical, generally-impenetrable random number generator is secretly simpler than we want to think and ultimately predictable, that should begin to raise some rather worrying existential questions.

let us return for a moment to the universe of Pokémon. in online communities formed around the _Pokémon_ console games, people generally discuss and share many different methods to change people's experience of the game or make use of novel strategies to achieve otherwise difficult or unimaginable goals. in a digital game, anybody could simply find ways of modifying the game processes or save memory in order to cheat. but what if sequence breaking through cheat codes is not the way you want to play the game, and you would rather create a unique challenge with its own kinds of difficulty, amounting more or less to inventing a new game? _Pokémon_ fans have created many of these kinds of challenges, from Nuzlocke challenges which allow players only a limited number of total Pokémon to various speedrun categories to finding ways to progress through _Pokémon_ games backwards. among these many alternate ways to play Pokémon is the challenge of _guessing the pseudorandom number generator seed_. players have created programs which can input various outward phenomenological events that happen within the game and the time displayed on the console clock along with a working model of how the pseudorandom number generator actually generates numbers in order to arrive at a state of things where the program is capable of predicting the outward shape of every subsequent event that will occur in the game. this process is not necessarily easy to pull off, as it requires players to time their actions very carefully to hit the correct system times and frames of the game in order to effectively align onto the exact cycle of the game's secret power series — in this sense, any useful outcomes of guessing the seed do require completing what amounts to their own lesser game challenge. nonetheless, should anyone be able to correctly complete this challenge, it is only a matter of time before they will be able to get almost any specific category of Pokémon they want. time the Pokémon trainer's actions versus the incidence of Pokémon encounters properly, and the player can decide which of several Pokémon will appear with the best statistics, or which of several Pokémon will appear as a Shiny Pokémon. if a pseudorandom number generator is basically just one big series of numbers coming into contact with a player or a clock, the Pokémon world only ever really had one free-floating object exerting the Entei effect, and should you manage to /leap over/ that single Entei effect, it won't be long before you can simply lock the path of your trainer onto the otherwise chaotic trails of the three wandering Legendary Beasts and get your hands on a Shiny Entei.

the fact that being able to predict an entire Pokémon game by merely knowing a number is a thing that exists is amusing and absurd. the _Pokémon_ series has been adapted into non-interactive stories any number of times, most famously including the _Pokémon_ TV show, but also including any number of manga adaptatons. in light of discovering the deeper workings of the games, how are we supposed to interpret the TV show? could there be some possibility that somebody existing in the universe of the _Pokémon_ TV show could also begin ending up with the rarest and strangest Pokémon just by guessing the universal random number generator seed? in general, few people would think of this as a possibility. to most people, it would appear that although the _Pokémon_ console games have a certain kind of artificiality in which they clearly present themselves through procedures and numbers, the universe of the Pokémon TV show possesses certain missing kinds of "reality" which further cause its inhabitants to behave like living beings and material objects such that this kind of trivial prediction of many things at once would not be possible. how does this happen? what are the characteristics of this more fully-simulated reality?
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=== metaphysics and alchemy for tiny bird Pokémon ===

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<div style="white-space: pre-wrap; font-family: inherit; background: inherit;">we can see, by this point in the investigation, that bringing up fictional beings and _Pokémon_ console games is not really about Pokémon. far beyond Pokémon, to discuss the intricacies of how players search for and encounter Shiny Pidgey is to discuss the entire relationship between observed reality and the underlying processes which construct reality and make it behave toward us as real. is something more real just because we can describe it with mathematics? is something less real because we can predict it? or is predictability actually the /definition/ of what's real? if something could come to be with no actual inner process of /how/ it came to be, would it have no reality to it?

this last statement is a rather concerning proposition for any being that lives in the _Pokémon_ universe, as you would know if you happen to have ever heard the phrase "Pokémon Egg". in the _Pokémon_ games, as well as on the TV show, Pokémon are born from proportionally-large ovular objects called Eggs. in some senses, Pokémon Eggs are similar to real-life animal eggs: a Pokémon Egg turns into a Pokémon after a certain period of events passing, a Pokémon Egg usually becomes some kind of small and incomplete form of Pokémon, and a Pokémon Egg "hatches" more effectively when it is warm. however, there are also some times at which Pokémon Eggs are implied not to be the exact same kind of living structure as animal eggs. within the rules of the TV show, Pokémon Eggs are depicted as lighting up and transforming into baby Pokémon in the same way that Pokémon progress or "evolve" to later forms rather than through tearing open and physically hatching. as well, there is also the most notable characteristic of Pokémon Eggs: a Pokémon Egg never, ever appears in reality during the time any human being is looking for it. Pokémon Eggs, as if one had taken the English-language idiom about watched pots very literally, exclusively appear when no one is watching. 

there are relatively obvious out-of-universe reasons behind the lore of Pokémon Eggs. if anybody could observe a Pokémon Egg coming into being and for instance, anybody ever observed an Egg coming out of a Pokémon, there would be too many questions. too many people would be asking heaps of questions that nobody honestly wants to ask about what is intended to be an "E" rated game. despite this, the way people comprehend Pokémon Eggs as a trope out-of-universe and the way Pokémon Eggs are treated in-universe are greatly misaligned, with _Pokémon_ games tending to take the matter of Pokémon Eggs mysteriously appearing as if it were a totally serious law of nature operating entirely on its own terms that the people of the Pokémon universe simply do not yet understand. from looking only at the dialogue and story details inside a _Pokémon_ game, one would get the impression that Pokémon Eggs are a genuine deep mystery of the cosmos, and Pokémon researchers have genuinely been attempting to figure out that mystery for a long time to no success. there is a lot to be said about the amazing juxtaposition between in-universe Pokémon researchers racking their brains about the origins of young Pokémon for likely hundreds of years, while players of the literal console games who can guess the pseudorandom number seed have somehow become in control of _all_ of the greatest mysteries of Pokémon Eggs. but aside from that, there is another question to ask: how can anybody in the Pokémon universe fathom the reality and existence of Pokémon if nobody understands the workings of Pokémon Eggs? Pokémon Eggs are Pokémon. every Pokémon, generally speaking, was once a Pokémon Egg. if this is the case, how does anyone in the Pokémon universe have any understanding of what a Pokémon is? real-life organisms are fairly straightforward. once somebody understands the general process of how any chicken produces eggs, or any Archosaur produces eggs, it is not difficult to put together a generalized model of what organic life is: a typical Animal takes the form of a collection of cells arranged into a being which are specified in an animal genome, it grows and develops more or less by periodically producing more cells, and it eventually reproduces itself by producing some kind of embryo inside it out of cells that then becomes a new individual organism. but if Pokémon Eggs just mysteriously appear from somewhere a bit beyond everybody's vision, possibly even including that of the Pokémon themselves, then how did Pokémon even come to be, and what exactly is continuously creating Pokémon?

as we have just shown, this question does in fact have some kind of answer. even if the answer to a question like this does not come in the form of a precise and detailed account of exactly how the deepest processes of the Pokémon universe work, that is not to say there is no answer at all. as we have already shown by demonstrating the dissonance between the exact assembly code of the _Pokémon_ games and what is suggested to be the stated reality experienced by the people within the Pokémon universe, if there is a gap between the way players understand a fictional universe and the way people within that fictional universe would experience that universe, it does not necessarily mean there will not _be_ an answer which can be discovered by the fictional inhabitants of a particular universe. in many cases, an adaptation such as the _Pokémon_ TV show will simply show up with partial explanations of things that had not been explained before, as if whether players understand it or not life in the _Pokémon_ universe will still go on. for one example, some particularly rare Pokémon such as Entei and Lugia are never even seen appearing from Pokémon Eggs; these _Legendary Pokémon_ often appear hidden in specific places within dungeon areas or simply concealed around the map at a count of one per game file. however, within the TV show Lugia was at one point depicted as occurring naturally in the same way as any other Pokémon in family units containing a parent and a child — seemingly implying that although no trainers usually get to discover one, Lugia can in fact appear as a Pokémon Egg. overall, the evidence would seem to indicate that simply because something appears mysterious to people in the Pokémon universe that is not to say there is not some actual process by which things happen, and is not to say that people would not be able to comprehend and explain said process as real. the outward phenomenological characterization of a process is no substitute for an actual explanation of how the process happens that people would find sufficient, but at the same time, observational science is not worthless, and if we so far only have the outward characterization of a process it is not reasonable to assume there will never _be_ an inward explanation.

with this, we can return to the case of Shiny Pidgey. if we were to imagine for a moment that we lived in the universe of the _Pokémon_ TV show, where all the physics of the world live inside the narrative and there is no chance of confusing the game code with the daily happenings of the fictional universe itself, where does Shiny Pidgey come from, and how would we know this?

the first way we discussed to characterize the origin of Shiny Pidgey is to collect aggregate data on wild Pokémon in terms of probability. if a Pokémon researcher simply studies and observes enough Pidgeys, they will probably find that their own sample approaches some probability of around 1 in 4,000 to 1 in 4,100. but is probability the entire picture of why Pokémon would be Shiny? certainly, something has to actually be _happening_ at a rate of one in four thousand, or none of the Pidgeys would actually become Shiny. but if we are allowed to use the console games as any vague guide of what is /not/ happening, there are very few ways in which Shiny Pokémon are in any way different from ordinary Pokémon. Shiny Pokémon do _look_ different, and are depicted in the games with a sparkling animation that may or may not be a meaningless interface flourish, but apart from that, there are no notable ways to tell a Shiny Pokémon from an ordinary Pokémon. the physically-observed incidence of around 4,000 ordinary Pokémon with each Shiny Pokémon is the only real, concrete information we have about exactly how Shiny Pokémon come to be.

within any particular population of Pokémon, a Shiny Pidgey is a small fraction of a population. at the same time, any particular Shiny or non-Shiny Pidgey is an individual.
whatever sort of genetic mutation or supernatural anomalous process causes Pokémon to be Shiny, this event happens within the bounds of free-floating individual bird-shaped objects. no individual Pidgey being Shiny influences any other Pidgey being Shiny, if we are to keep in mind the stated fact within the console games that whenever there are two Pokémon next to which Pokémon Eggs appear, Pokémon cannot pass down the trait of being Shiny and each Pokémon becomes Shiny separately.
there is something within each Pidgey or interacting with each Pidgey that makes it Shiny, but at the same time this process is something that exists before all Pidgeys and transcends all Pidgeys. if we were to pull specific stated pieces of evidence from the overall _Pokémon_ universe lore, it is likely that there were particular Legendary Pokémon in far ancient times such as Mew, or failing a Pokémon of that tier, a more ordinary Legendary Pokémon such as Groudon or Xerneas who in some other circumstance theoretically could have been Shiny. with many chances for Pokémon to be Shiny before Pidgey even existed, it is almost certain that Pokémon being Shiny is a more fundamental process of the Pokémon universe than Pidgey existing. and yet at the same time these fundamental processes can only take place inside a Pidgey or they do not happen. without an actual instance of an individual object, in this case an individual Pokémon, the fundamental process we have identified that is greater than any individual paradoxically cannot manifest itself in reality. what is it that connects the general phenomenon of Shiny Pokémon with actual living Pidgeys? could being a Shiny Pokémon be some kind of utterly abstract quality which is only embodied in physical things, or is there some actual material process, conventionally-physical or magical, that has to operate from outside the normal growth process of a Pokémon onto Pidgeys in order to create a Shiny Pidgey?

this Shiny Pidgey problem has stumped philosophers for thousands and thousands of years. certainly, they did not phrase the problem in terms of Pidgey, or in terms of Pokémon. however, this problem did rear its head with many real-world objects, including metal ores. if nobody had actually seen a metal first come to be, how would anyone know where metals actually came from? people could see that there were different metals, like gold, silver, and iron, but they had no idea what kind of process might first make the matter in the universe into gold. nor did even the best philosophers in ancient Greece _really_ know what first made the matter in the universe into trees, specifically in terms of what kind of smallest particles a tree might be made of. were trees made of some kind of special wood atoms that would ultimately arrange themselves into bark, wood, and tree rings? was gold made of gold atoms, or was there some smaller or more abstract thing that made gold?

within the context of the Pokémon universe, various objects and Pokémon can express qualities that do not seem to have a consistent physical logic for how they have those qualities. namely, the creator Pokémon Arceus is known to have possessed 18 plates which happen to have an elemental Type. Pokémon and a number of various objects Pokémon can use are all associated with Types: Charizard is a Fire-type and a Flying-type, but various ordinary objects like charcoal, bird beaks, and poison barbs all seem to in some sense have Types. if Charizard equips the Black Glasses and bites something, the power of its moves is increased, because these techniques are usually Dark-type. but anyone not familiar with _Pokémon_ would probably find this statement rather strange. if Charizard uses a physical technique, why is that technique not considered Fire- or Flying-type? even if we accept it as perfectly logical that Black Glasses are simply one of the most antagonistic accessories one could equip, and it made perfect sense that they were Dark-type, why exactly does this Dark-type item power up techniques that involve biting — what part of these techniques is interacting with the item in the first place?
one of the only sensical answers is that Pokémon types are metaphysical, and metaphysics applies to the Pokémon universe literally. in real life, metaphysics is largely an ontological exercise of mapping things into categories to attempt to understand them; philosophers may label things like novels and history accounts as "narratives" or question what things qualify as a "monster" and how and why we decided those categories, or whether things like corporations should be considered "countable Cultures". in the _Pokémon_ universe, however, things really do seem to be _made of_ abstract categories. a Pokémon professor does not totally hold the say on whether Pokémon are Ground-type; various processes of the Pokémon universe such as the broad class of creator Pokémon seem to be able of creating Pokémon that as they come into existence are _inherently_ Ground-type. this is a notion worth thinking about for a bit. in the real world, a pile of leaves can be a pile of leaves one day, and mulch or soil another day, but it is not _inherently_ soil-like throughout its whole life in the sense that Diglett is always Ground-type. a real-world rock can be a silicate mineral one day, sand on a beach some number of centuries later, and glass another day, but when it is glass, it is not _inherently_ boulder-like the way Onix is always Rock-type. if Onix is traded to another game with a Metal Coat it can become Steelix using said apparently-Steel-type item. however, the fact that Onix can change into Steelix does not mean that Types are suddenly a thing that is inherently mutable. one item that Pokémon can equip is a block of ice which never melts into water, and always somehow stays in a solid state. one could always hypothesize that this substance isn't typical water, or somehow became ice in an unusual way — astrophysicists can point to evidence that deep inside some planets, very hot water molecules can be pushed into a solid form at high enough pressures,  [*in]  so it is a real-world fact that not every kind of ice will melt specifically because it has previously departed from room temperature. either way, it is not likely that _Pokémon_ games are intentionally designed to leave us thinking that a block of non-melting ice is actually the exotic substance Ice XIX. when there is a large rock hidden in a cave embodying the Ice type, and Eevee uses the Ice rock to become Glaceon, it is more likely that we are meant to think of this as Eevee taking on the essence of Ice. although Eevee can change once, after that it will continue to be Ice-type, just like the non-melting block of ice. there may be regions of the Pokémon world which consistently remain cold for centuries or milennia due to the earth's tilt, but that is not why Glaceon, the Ice rock, and the never-melt-ice are Ice-type — they just _have_ the abstract quality of Ice, and then they exist.

so, with that knowledge, we may return to the problem of Shiny Pokémon. where do Shiny Pokémon come from? we cannot actually use the assembly code of the _Pokémon_ console games to answer this question. within the code, there is a random number generated which determines several characteristics of Pokémon including whether they are Shiny (the "personality value"). but as we have covered earlier, all this value practically represents within the physics of the Pokémon universe is that Pokémon are individual free-floating objects whose characteristics are not known to the trainer at first, and the basic outward observation that Pokémon are Shiny sometimes in a particular ratio. the fact the game rolls out this number like a many, _many_ sided die does not actually tell us anything about _what way_ a Pokémon within the Pokémon world becomes Shiny or not. so, could it be that Pokémon become Shiny through some kind of metaphysical category, taking on the property of being Shiny by absorbing this essence in a similar way to how Eevee becomes Glaceon by interacting with the Ice rock? it is arguable that if anyone lives within the Pokémon universe as depicted on the TV show or in manga adaptations, they would not necessarily be able to know or prove that this was not the case. the metaphysical nature of the _Pokémon_ world makes it difficult to trivially guess what the actual mechanisms for anything might be. if you lived in a world where things could simply be _inherently_ Ice, or stranger yet, _inherently_ Dragon despite being a full-size walking palm tree or some kind of flying acid-spitting insect, where species do come and go over time but there are far fewer known transitional forms to the point a reasonable person would begin to wonder if Pokémon do not truly speciate but are actually continuously created, could you really even begin to guess why something like Shiny Pokémon were the way they were on your own? _Pokémon_ games, to their credit, always do seem to imply that most Pokémon researchers are doing field research and by extension that a much greater portion of scientific research in the Pokémon universe is observational while theoretical scientists concocting some Pokémon equivalent of string theory may be much rarer than in our world. there is a good reason for this focus: metaphysics, in some senses, has generally been a great complication and mystification of the way the world really works. it may be harmless in a Pokémon game, or even amusing as the lore goes to greater and greater lengths to explain how everything having inherent Types does in fact make sense. however, in the real world, one of the greatest advances in the sciences was the act of casting away the notion of metaphysical qualities and replacing more or less all of them with such things as _arrangements_ and _processes_. a real-world scientist knows that "fire" is the accelerating movement of molecules to faster and more vigorous expansion, and "ice" is the close arrangement of molecules into crystal-like solids, whether the substance is actually even cold or just really really compressed. what kind of progressing arrangement of things performs a process called "dragon" is anyone's guess, but on the other hand, now that metallurgy has moved from alchemy to chemistry nobody is any longer messing around trying to figure out what abstract combination of Hot, Cold, Wet, and Dry will cause the universe to appear a lump of gold.

_Pokémon_ is hardly a trivial fantasy series devoid of logic and science. internet video channels and forum threads have analyzed the logic of the _Pokémon_ universe for hours at a time simply figuring out how everything that nearly appears to connect on the surface actually does. despite what the occasional older-generation science writer might want to believe about the merits of these kinds of series, children in modern times are probably _vastly_ better equipped than they were twenty years ago to understand the concepts of relativity and repeated patterns in material reality purely due to the popularity of _Pokémon_ and other such console or tabletop role-playing games featuring simulated random events. they say a picture is worth a thousand words. if people haven't come to fully understand Einstein's theories from various editions or commentaries on his written works, then they'll eventually come to understand those concepts thanks to Shiny Pidgey.
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