Editing Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill (section)

== Twilight Sparkle has no free will ==

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<div class="bop-text">The existence of "free will" is one of the most overrated questions in philosophy. People attach a whole lot of significance to the question of "whether we have free will", acting like it would entirely change their view on human existence or the universe if there were no such thing as Free Will, or alternatively, outright asserting that if some particular, specific concept of Free Will does not make sense then it is a meaningful statement to say that the universe is somehow subject to some unnecessarily-specific concept labeled "determinism", or that there "is no" Free Will and people are merely "desperately holding onto" its imagined specter. The world of philosophers is a strange one where at times it will feel like absolutely nothing in the world of philosophical discourse has anything whatsoever to do with real life. In the case of Free Will, this is nothing less than a perfectly-warranted impression. For anyone going through any form of daily life, the question of whether individual human beings have Free Will _simply does not matter_.

Perhaps this proposition will shock you. Perhaps your first response will be to try to rationalize exactly why it is that any individual _must_ possess Free Will in order to make choices, or perhaps your response will be to nod understandingly at the concept that even if this passage did not perfectly describe _you_, you can still entirely see how some of the individuals who read a particular written passage can at times be utterly predictable. The one thing either philosophically-opinionated version of you was much less likely to be ready for, however, is the position that the entire discussion around Free Will is almost entirely orthogonal to the issues involving individuals and consciousness which are actually important.

<cite>[[redlink|Existential Physics]]</cite>, Hossenfelder's book on people's common misconceptions about scientific concepts, details a particular kind of person who upon learning about various scientific concepts of physics equations and predictability becomes weighed down by the depressing realization of a random, uncaring universe in which supposedly nothing matters any longer because every decision and all life on earth is either the product of a predetermined process or a pure random fluke. Surely, if particular human lives do not emerge from the Free Choices of particular individuals, nothing any longer means anything, and nothing any longer has a purpose. Could human beings even arbitrarily _assign_ anything meaning without the ability to Freely Choose? Why, if we don't have Free Will, it would almost appear the entire practice of philosophy is dead. [[redlink|[*QHW]]]

Of course, if we were to see the world through anything but the traditional established ontologies set down by philosophers, we would quickly see that these sorts of extended inferences on the meaning of existence hardly have any truth to them, and the entire question of the presence _or_ absence of Free Will is nonsensical and silly.

To bring us all back from traditional philosophy to reality, we only need one slightly unusual question: do fictional characters possess Free Will?

Say that you have recently started watching generation 4 of _My Little Pony_, an animated TV show produced through Adobe-Flash-style puppet animation and known in full as _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_. On this show, there are any number of main characters and side characters who all have clearly-defined personalities. The main cast consists of no less than six defined characters, each with a particular associated color palette and visual symbol, and who at certain times throughout the show's episodes can be seen lining up together with streams of color in front of them or behind them forming into a kind of half-literal personality rainbow. Rainbow Dash, for instance, is a bold and reckless pegasus pony associated with the concept of "loyalty". Twilight Sparkle, the most central character who gets a large portion of the focus, is a lavender-to-violet unicorn pony associated with relatively multidisciplinary academic studies, her treehouse library, and the concept of "magic". Applejack is associated with her apple farm and the element of "honesty". Rarity has an emblem of three diamonds and is associated with the element of "generosity". Pinkie Pie has a design which looks exactly like the kind of pony expected to have a confetti cannon, and is associated with the element of "laughter". Fluttershy takes care of lost or wounded animals in accordance with her element of "kindness".

You are trying to analyze a particular episode of this fictional TV show. What exactly you are analyzing the narrative _for_ does not matter. Maybe you simply want to better understand the lore and connected logic of the _Friendship is Magic_ universe. Maybe your personal idea of defeating boredom is to idly scrutinize the show to try to create a class analysis of the history of Equestria. When you analyze a TV show episode for other reasons, do you ever generally think of the question "does Twilight Sparkle have Free Will"? Does it ever cross your mind to ask whether, if Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash are defined characters within defined fictional the universe of _My Little Pony_ that act in defined ways, _if we temporarily suspend our disbelief and take it as its own functioning reality_, that Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash have no Free Will? If you were analyzing the TV show adaptation of _Pokémon_, would you ask yourself if the Pokémon or the trainers had Free Will, or if you were analyzing _Dragon Ball_, would you ask yourself if each of the central heroes of the story including Goku, Krillin, or Bulma had this ability?

In the case of most people and most popular fictional TV shows or comics, it is likely the answer to this question is "no". Whether characters within a fictional universe might be swept away in the unrelenting currents of determinism and perhaps have their entire existences rendered meaningless is not something we tend to think about. What is the actual reason for this? Is it simply because we would rather lose ourselves in fiction in order to not think about anything at all? Or is it actually the case that whether _real people_ have Free Will does not matter, and this more reasonable way of conceptualizing our own inner narrative bleeds over to the way we process fictional narratives?

When you analyze an episode of _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_, it is likely that you will be thinking less about whether the characters are "truly" making their own individual choices, and more about in what ways the characters are interacting with each other. If Rainbow Dash, in her loud, carefree approach to things has one idea about the best way to do something and Rarity has another way more suited to her meticulous, refined tastes, you will probably not be asking yourself whether the episode's problem lies in how Rainbow Dash decided to be Rainbow Dash or Rarity decided to be Rarity. You probably will not even be thinking about the greater philosophical problem of how characters are really just an invention by writers which do not literally have the ability to decide anything, and how the initial decisions made by writers affect all the subsequent more logical, physics-like interactions of characters and other objects within the fictional universe once the narrative has begun. You don't have the time for either one of those things. You are most likely simply going to focus on the episode's immediate events between all its various characters, beasts, and artifacts and attempt to figure out the best way that each of these already-defined entities can coexist. Regardless of what choices either of them may have made or not made before this point, Rainbow Dash is already Rainbow Dash and Rarity is already Rarity, no matter what. If the show has an episode about Applejack badly trying to hide a big mistake from others, the major focus of the episode will not be on the decisions Applejack made _before_ the big mistake or the events that railroaded her into having done this thing — the episode will be about how Applejack and her friends can create a better future by simply proceeding from the way things already are to get themselves out of that situation. When an episode ends with a particular solution or message, Ponies are never preoccupied with what they each individually _chose_ to do or _wanted_ to do as much as what they all _actually did_ as community or a group of friends in order to enact a friendship lesson.

Philosophy is strange. Whenever we analyze situations in a fictional narrative, we always seem to actually use common sense. Whenever we analyze fiction, we always immediately rule out explanations that don't actually add any explanatory power given the evidence we have, such as theories that the main character was actually in a coma or that the whole story was a book written by other fictional characters in a different version of the same universe. Whenever we analyze fiction we all suddenly transform into reasonable scientists making proper use of Occam's razor, such that should somebody show up with a bizarre new theory that Digimon are actually garbled Pokémon or that Pinkie Pie is secretly another non-pink pony revived by the rose-tinted healing powers of Steven Universe, we sooner or later put these claims aside as "uninteresting" or "irrelevant" and return to interpretations that deal directly with the observable facts of the fictional universe. And yet, as soon as we go back and start creating philosophy about _the real world_, suddenly everyone gets the urge to ponder and devote great amounts of paper and ink and digital data to the questions of if all of us could be brains in vats in some shared simulation or if we "truly have free will".

Why is it there is such a difference between the questions "do I have free will" and "does Twilight Sparkle have free will"? If this is a meaningful question in either case, isn't it equally applicable to both real life and fiction? If this question is not meaningful in the context of either fiction or real life, then why do we keep bringing it up in the context of real life? Why is it that when we analyze created fictional worlds we are fully willing to analyze them as simple systems of interconnected moving parts and focus directly on what's in front of us, while when it comes to real-life philosophy we always have to vastly overcomplicate things? Why is it that we always come up with such stupid questions after reading about objective science facts versus such smart and intuitively-informed lore questions after reading fiction?

The short answer is "culture". While the overall model takes a rather long time to unpack and dig into the full depths of, such that it cannot be properly covered in this chapter, the brief explanation is that no human individual actually processes the world as an individual, and instead, human beings process things and come to agreed answers by forming themselves into particular spatially-unique groups of people with particular principles and consensus frameworks for how the group has decided to model things — _Social-Philosophical Systems_. If people wish to discuss fiction in a social setting, they all link themselves together into some sort of loosely-connected social formation, and this social formation begins to take on rules all its own which do not actually belong to any of the original individuals individually. A united small fanbase, or a more localized and isolated fandom fragment, comes to be specifically _because_ people agree on a particular internal ontology of how the pieces of a fictional world connect together. In some senses, the inner ontology of a fictional world _is_ the fictional world; the ontology of a piece of fiction _is_ the piece of fiction. And as such, whenever anyone tries to interact with a particular fandom fragment, they will then find that the particular orthodoxies and preferences that initially created the fandom fragment exert a kind of filtering effect on what kinds of people and opinions are subsequently allowed into it. If somebody begins talking about theories or imagined plotlines that stray too far from the established concepts of _My Little Pony_, they are no longer discussing _My Little Pony_. If somebody goes too far into changing all the details of _Dragon Ball_, they are no longer discussing _Dragon Ball_. If somebody walks too far away from fitting into the exact current understandings and talking points of some specific spacetime-unique center-Liberal party, in the eyes of many people they are no longer speaking about politics. And if somebody wanders too far away from the established plan of a workers' state, there will be a very stern discussion had over whether they are "really a Soviet person" any longer. Societies and fanbases both operate on inner ontologies, which in the case of workers' states are best known as _Particle Theories_ or _Bauplans_. This is how culture, in the highly specific sense of political-economic theories of society and the entire scope of everyday processes of political discourse and daily life, is tightly intertwined into a single simultaneous process of "socioeconophilosophy" — people carry out life as a Social System of friends and acquaintances glued together by a Philosophical System of political economy, which then regenerates itself politically and economically into a Social-Philosophical-Material System of town-based or national culture.

In short, the status of fiction as a kind of direct communication between individuals which ties them into a larger group ends up regulating the way people all collectively perceive and interpret fiction as a connected social whole. Philosophy, however, does not always follow this process because it is often not inherently concerned with the act of assembling individuals into enduring groups of people. Philosophy, in its quest to constantly generate the most abstract concepts and "independent thinkers", ironically often ends up less concerned with the matter of getting many disparate groups of people aligned onto the task of accurately perceiving the same reality than does the act of doing art criticism on any given piece of fiction.

But, even in light of all this, nobody could blame a typical person alive today for not having a clear understanding of where Free Will "went". If the concept of Free Will is wholly irrelevant, and we can't pin this change on the rise of determinism, then what exactly _did_ make the concept of Free Will obsolete? Do we really know for sure that any particular set of moving parts within any particular defined fictional narrative _does not_ have Free Will? One person might look at an episode of _Friendship is Magic_ and specifically determine that it made no sense to say Twilight Sparkle definitely showed a _lack_ of Free Will, but another person might take that same line of thinking further and ask why it would not make perfect sense to claim that within the defined fictional universe of _My Little Pony_ and within our suspension of disbelief, characters such as Rainbow Dash and Twilight do in fact make active individual choices during the course of episodes and each friendship lesson ultimately comes together because the characters _do_ display a simulated form of Free Will. How could anybody know for sure that this is not a reasonable statement?

In order for all of us to properly understand what an entity is, what a decision is, and whether Twilight Sparkle may in fact be _making_ individualized decisions, it would be best to begin back where we started: with random number generators, tabletop roleplaying games, and twenty-sided dice.
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