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

== Does Shenlong have free will? ==

<div class="bop academic">
<div class="bop-text">we have now defined fairly solidly what determinism and predictability are in physics, and by extension in everyday life. predictability is not something that comes in a binary "on or off" state, but almost more like a continuum of exactly _how_ effective or ineffective some particular system is at generating multiple possible local histories. the more unfilled blanks there are in information about a system as viewed from some other point in spacetime, the more unpredictable it will outwardly appear. the easier it is to fill in the blanks with several possible guesses, the easier it is to predict unpredictable things anyway.

of course, none of this predictability and unpredictability stuff is as interesting to most people as the _real_ question: how do living entities make decisions, and are those decisions more accurately described as coming from inside or outside them? in order to explore the possible answers to this question, we can once again turn to created fictional universes and ask ourselves: what does it mean for a fictional character to be _free to do anything_?

one very illustrative example of the concept of choice and freedom in fiction is the mythical serpentine dragon alluded to in the title of _Dragon Ball_, known as Shenlong. without getting too far into the detailed lore of the _Dragon Ball_ universe, Shenlong is a magical being created by some of the most powerful figures on _Dragon Ball_'s earth, and given the power to grant anyone in possession of the seven Dragon Balls one wish at any particular time before vanishing and having to regenerate its power. there is one thing that must be made very clear: Shenlong is a construct. although the dragon moves and speaks exactly like any naturally-born organic entity, one episode of the animated series shows it initially being sculpted out of some kind of clay or stone. before _Dragon Ball_ existed, _Journey to the West_ portrayed one of its major characters (Sun Wukong) as being similarly animated through a generic universe-spirit out of a non-living rock. Shenlong is not alive through any conventional physical process, is made of stone, has no conventional parents or relatives, and was built for a specified purpose; were there no such thing as magic, this entity would be artificial in every way.

now that we know the background of what Shenlong is and where this entity came from, we can begin to see an interesting contradiction in _Dragon Ball_'s narrative. Shenlong certainly appears alive, as much as any of the main characters. he can perceive things, respond to what is happening, and reply intelligently to what other beings say. in the reboot continuity _Dragon Ball Super_, Shenlong at one point behaves with signs of fear toward a more powerful entity, suggesting that he may have a kind of inner experience.  [*m]  every behavior coming out of Shenlong would seem to be the behavior of a conscious being which is at least as intelligent as a house cat, if not fully as intelligent as any of the beings _Dragon Ball_ considers people. however, at the same time, this apparent self-awareness exists in contradiction with the fact Shenlong was created for exactly one purpose. Shenlong does not exist for his own sake, but first of all to fulfill whatever other beings tell him to do. during the time he is not performing a useful task for someone else, he essentially does not even exist. keeping all of this in mind, is it or is it not the case that Shenlong has Free Will?

clearly, what we define as an entity having Free Will will first of all depend on how we even think Free Will is defined. people could have many different definitions based on what general kinds of mechanisms or processes they think might be _behind_ Free Will. say somebody in the _Pokémon_ universe knows that they have seen Pokémon Eggs, but does not know how Pokémon Eggs appear. people might come up with many different proposed explanations of the magic or metaphysics behind the appearance of Pokémon Eggs, and why even if everyone can agree that Eggs most likely don't come directly out of Pokémon and it is not the Pokémon intentionally hiding them it would be so impossible for the spontaneous appearance of Eggs to be observed. similarly, people will proceed from their intuition and observations of outward reality to define Free Will, coming up with proposed internal processes for the phenomenon they "know" they have already observed.

one possible definition of Free Will, probably the worst one, is that people have Free Will because they are unpredictable. this is one of a few definitions put forth in Rothenberg's book _The Excessive Subject_, in which the inaccessible area of unknown information inside individual human beings that lies beyond the horizon of what we can know (the "excess") is said to give people their very individuality and identity and right to be free, thus rendering them into so-called "excessive subjects". if Goku does some action lightly mocking Vegeta that he is not prepared for, or Vegeta refuses to cooperate with Goku, this is taken to be an outward sign that each of them has Free Will, although it is not necessarily the strict definition of what Free Will is — for this we are asked to refer back to the basic definition of "the subject". in any case, we have already proved that the Vegeta effect shrouding the inner workings of Goku or Vegeta definitely _does not_ show that they have Free Will. a twenty-sided die exerts a Vegeta effect, and a pseudorandom number generator exerts a Vegeta effect. very few people who believe in the existence of Free Will would seriously say that either a die or an erratic power series has Free Will, or a simulated Pokémon data structure within an 8-bit or 16-bit console game; the fiction of the Pokémon TV show may be different, but no one would expect to find Free Will within the scope of the games' coding itself.

another possible definition is that we can assume something has Free Will when it has _the ability to have done otherwise_. this is an equally bad definition, because we have already shown with the perfectly round ball on top of the perfectly smooth dome that many inanimate objects with no consciousness whatsoever possess the ability to have done otherwise. any relatively complex system of inanimate objects, such as the ball and dome, a pile of sand grains, or a solution of water molecules interacting with a solute, has many possible ways it could behave at any given moment according to our limited knowledge of where everything is and how it is moving. "the ability to have done otherwise" would seem to be less of a definition of the Free Will of conscious individuals and more of what history is, or what the future is. a ball resting on a dome is no different from a twenty-sided die in its level of self-awareness, yet it hypothetically has many possible futures until we get more information of exactly what future it is currently headed toward. given any one particular hypothetical future, the real system of moving parts certainly _could act_ otherwise, and after the ball eventually rolls off the dome, had the small-scale pieces of the system been arranged differently it is just as fair to say it certainly _could have done_ otherwise.

some people would claim that Free Will is defined as the lack of determinism. the first problem here is the mention of _determinism_ as if it means anything specific or is easily distinguishable from the general process of relativistically-separated parts of the universe watching other parts of the universe settle out of superpositions onto particular known outcomes. so, if we wish to get anywhere with this definition it is very important to specify that here _determinism_ specifically refers to the ability of physical systems to _limit and prevent the capacity of an entity to do otherwise_. commonly, these particular understandings of Free Will and determinism are used to argue the position of _libertarian free will_ that in fact, physical systems _can never_ actually limit the ability of conscious agents to actively defy them and attempt to do otherwise. however, if we examine this definition of _determinism_ more closely, we would see that it does not necessarily need to be used to argue such a strong position. if _determinism_ is specifically the interaction of living agents with predictable physical processes that limit their ability to act, then it is being defined in a way mostly similar to its use in physics. however, we have already seen that if we were to take this definition of Free Will and swap in the _actual_ definition of determinism used in physics, determinism is by no means the exact same thing as predetermination applying to whole living entities or an entire universe, and in fact, is almost near synonymous with the statement that _physics exists_ and material entities are made of physics. if we were to ask anyone that believed in the existence of Free Will, it is not likely that any of them would have objections to the statement that every part of human beings is made from physics. cells must operate according to physics. genomes must operate according to physics. neurons must operate according to physics. every atom in a human body that makes up a human cell is made of quarks and gluons which are made of physics. what necessarily follows, although it will almost certainly generate objections from philosophers, is that if Free Will in fact exists, _Free Will must also be made of physics_. here we run into a great contradiction: Free Will is often believed to be some kind of defiance of even the most localized kinds of determinism, but yet, if Free Will is made of physics, we usually think of physics as rigid, mathematical, and predictable, as behaving with at least a localized kind of determinism which reduces everything unpredictable back down to charted and predictable processes of physics. does this contradiction trace back to our working definition of Free Will as acting in opposition to the physical processes we know we can observe everywhere, or is philosophers' error simply in assuming that Free Will cannot simply be a process of one kind of physics struggling to pull itself out of another kind of physics?

here, we land ourselves at the _compatibilist_ category of definitions of Free Will. compatibilism is, in general, the claim that if Free Will exists there is nothing wrong with Free Will being composed of physics. the task of the compatibilist, then, is simply to attempt to characterize _what_ kind of physics with what kinds of processes and components that Free Will might actually be. this definition is certainly a valiant attempt. there are problems that eventually crop up when using it, namely the problem that if one follows it far enough, one will eventually begin to realize that the real purpose of characterizing the existence or nonexistence of Free Will has nothing to do with whether individual physical humans can choose to defy physics. if somebody speaks of "freedom" in regular conversation, and perhaps happens to be using the philosophical conception of Free Will as a defensive barrier around this, that person likely does not actually care whether physics prevents us from having "true" Free Will for the purposes of practically defining what freedom is or why the Free Will of particular people is important to listen to. because this overall topic can get much more complicated once we get past the simple discussion of whether Free Will can be wholly eliminated from our model of the universe and into the discussion of what Free Will practically means once we have stopped fighting against the existence of physics, we will need to put aside these deeper discussions of compatibilist models of human self-awareness and return to them later.

one of the more decent definitions of Free Will, in an odd irony, is the dubious argument given by the researcher in SCP-6217. by this definition, a particular entity has Free Will when it is able to consider or choose the possibility of detaching itself from a larger entity, and this larger entity or process does not determine everything about its existence. unlike some other definitions such as the Vegeta effect definition of Free Will or a wholly-traditional Libertarian Free Will definition not properly counterbalanced with the physics sense of determinism, this definition does actually give us something to work with. the separation between objects is something we can confirm, and although by itself this characteristic could be used to argue that sand grains and water molecules have Free Will, the most important parts of the definition lie outside that, in the vague definition of whatever process the separate free-floating entity is actually going through in order to make decisions. the model of Free Will used to put together this particular SCP tale clearly takes much of its material from traditional discussions of Libertarian Free Will, but at the same time, in the act of introducing the Broken God, the narrative accidentally ends up using this character to present a surprisingly more realistic notion of relativity and the universe being made of various kinds of separate interacting objects which instead of ever operating according to any one homogeneous set of rules continually struggle against each other. this is a decent definition of one possible process for how Free Will hypothetically might operate. it does not casually conflate the Vegeta effect around entities with the actual thinking entities inside that relativistic horizon, and it does not make any other easily-identifiable logical errors. of course, this definition does present a few interesting quirks that warrant further investigation. for one, this particular definition of Free Will logically leads to the statements that nationalities or ethnic groups have the capacity to have a kind of Free Will of their own in that they sometimes opt to detach themselves from containing populations and form new nation-states, and that Leon Trotsky had Free Will because he showed the capacity to detach himself from the Soviet Union and attempt to found a new country or group of countries around the new political-economic ideology of Trotskyism. for now, we will assume that these propositions _could hypothetically be true_ given that they _have not been falsified_, and will come back and revisit them later.

now that we have laid out several of the most common or best-known definitions of Free Will, as well as a couple of better-constructed ones which are less obvious, it is time to apply them. given all of these various definitions of Free Will, are we yet able to distinguish whether within the defined universe of _Dragon Ball_ Shenlong does or does not have it?

our first definition of Free Will proposed that because individuals are free-floating objects and they contain unknown information, this is ultimately the thing that precipitates the greater process of transforming inanimate objects into conscious Subjects which make use of their ability to determine themselves as individuals and roll over that hidden information into new information in order to make their own individual decisions. superficially this definition might seem logically consistent, or even appealing. however, it has one very big problem. if the major hallmark of a conscious, Freely-Deciding Subject is simply that from the outside it appears to have unknown information, we have no real way of knowing whether anything _is_ a Subject from the outside. say that the seven Dragon Balls are lying in front of Goku and his friends as inanimate objects, and one of these round glass-like spheres slowly starts rolling in an unexpected direction. this inanimate object has unknown physical information causing it to move independently. does that make it an excessive Subject? how would we have any ability to distinguish between Shenlong in inanimate object form and Shenlong in animate dragon form using this definition, let alone pick out any possible differences between Goku and Shenlong?

if every Subject is an excessive Subject, then every door somebody accidentally runs into is an excessive door, every shoe somebody trips on is an excessive shoe, and every dark cloud the weather forecast didn't predict is an excessive raincloud. perhaps for some particularly insular monarchies that refuse to listen to their people, there is such a thing as an excessive Communist revolution. but rather unfortunately for anyone who lives in a science fiction timeline, any inhabited planet could one day come into contact with an excessive gamma ray burst, an excessive kilonova, or an excessive meteor. clearly, whether something is "excessive" in the sense of lacking predictability and outwardly observable information does not have much to do with whether it has Free Will or whether it is alive, let alone whether it is a _desirable event_. if your theory of Free Will ends up attributing human rights to impending asteroid collisions, there just might be something wrong with it.

the second definition of Free Will we covered was that Free Will is the ability to have done otherwise. this definition at least has a small amount of actual applicability to living things. if there is a stationary boulder, and next to the boulder is a lark, we can see that the lark is capable of reacting to such stimuli as food or threats and apparently _deciding_ to move to various other areas of a natural environment. a boulder, in contrast, always stays in the same place, so in a sense, it can never do anything but what it already does — choices or no choices, it can almost never do otherwise. this particular claim about the natural world probably would not be inherently objectionable to many people alive today. while any number of philosophers and theologians in past centuries tried to assert that non-human animals are mechanical entities and could never actually possess any form of Free Will, many people nowadays would not likely have any objection to the concept that any songbird has Free Will although a boulder and a stream do not. people may or may nor argue over whether a tree could have Free Will, or whether a microscopic algal cell with the ability to sense light and move in a particular direction could, but at the same time, the concept that a deer, a housecat, a mouse, a _Tyrannosaurus_, and most or all other Animals belonging to the phylogenetic clade Animalia could all in fact possess Free Will starting back in the time of their distant ancestors before humans ever did would hardly be an unthinkable statement at this point in history. if this is the definition of Free Will we are going to use, then it is worth noting that within the set of ontological categories used by science fiction authors this definition asserts Free Will to correspond to the concept of _sentience_ rather than _sapience_ — that in order for an entity to possess Free Will it does not actually need to possess a complicated consciousness granting full self-awareness. the choice of whether to use this definition is somewhat subjective. although some people might find this definition more or less satisfying, others might prefer that Free Will actually referred to the unique kinds of deliberation that human beings go through over individual choices. it is certainly fair to want to ask this question, regardless of what terms and definitions someone decides to frame it under. thus, we will consider this one of the valid definitions of Free Will going forward, but not the definitive overarching definition of Free Will.

the third definition of Free Will we examined was that Free Will is the ability of living things to suspend determinism, or put more plainly, to struggle against physics and defy the course that physics would otherwise take. this is a complicated one. on the surface, we can see that any living thing _does_ in fact struggle against physics — in general, all living things struggle against the natural breakdown of any particular assembled structure of matter in order to continuously build themselves and exist as organic life. when a biological cell deteriorates or begins malfunctioning, the organism shuts it down and builds a new one. when a protein or tissue composed of cells tears apart, the organism struggles to put the damaged area back together or replace it. in every way, the basic definition of Libertarian Free Will as the ability to do otherwise is connected back to the basic definition of organisms as emergent assemblies of actively-moving, actively-struggling biology. if Free Will is the ability to suspend certain kinds of determinism, then it is very hard to argue against the claim that a lark has Free Will purely because it is alive and is a complex Eukaryotic organism made of cells that can react to food or predators. 

using this approach to evaluate _Dragon Ball_, it would seem that if Shenlong possesses biology and responds to stimuli in the same overall way a biological entity would, it is difficult to claim that Shenlong does not possess Free Will. does Shenlong experience pain or suffering? if some powerful entity tried to destroy Shenlong, or somebody managed to stress the dragon's body beyond its limits, would these things _hurt_? or would this simply be a case of the earth's useful, wondrous artificial wish machine malfunctioning and behaving in new ways? if somebody were to maliciously punch over Goku or Vegeta into the ground we generally know that each form of living human or alien within _Dragon Ball_ has the ability to subjectively experience pain, to biologically react to the threat, and in this sense to exert a kind of individual will to recover from harm and stay alive. does Shenlong experience this process? does Shenlong have the capacity to seek to continue existing, to react to the imposition of the world into himself and to respond to the rest of the world with a series of actions which proceeds from or constructs a unique will or desire for the basic needs of the entity known as Shenlong? this is a very good question. in asking it, we start to unravel the many complexities of actually defining what a Subject even is and how most existing discussions of "experience" or "thought" or "self-awareness" do not actually seem to begin from satisfactory definitions of any of the things they are discussing. in how many cases will we seem to have discovered that Shenlong is a conscious agent just like Goku and then realize he has only passed the Turing test, and we still do not know if he is truly experiencing anything? if Shenlong reacts to an external threat with signs of fear, is that just a programmed response perfectly characteristic of a non-experiencing magic robot? is Shenlong just a superficial simulation of a living thing, or is he actually an artificially-constructed living thing? on the other side of things, what if Shenlong really _is_ alive, but self-awareness is actually a much more simple and prosaic thing than we thought it was? what if there is no actual difference between basic sentience and self-awareness, and all sentience really _is_ a form of self-awareness in the sense that all attempts of a wild Animal to preserve the self must require some minimal biological awareness of the existence of the self?

the fourth definition of Free Will we addressed was that Free Will is simply another form of physics, and physics is perfectly capable of taking on new forms in which it struggles against itself. here there is not a lot more to say, because all of us would generally find it obvious and unobjectionable that if Shenlong is carrying out the same kinds of fictional _physics_ as Goku, then Shenlong is the same kind of entity as Goku. to say that Free Will is made of physics within a universe where most or all things are made of physics is something of a lesser tautology. however, in a universe where entities can be made of something a bit more specific than _merely_ physics, the distinction between the everyday rules of the universe and these more specific cases can open up a lot of interesting questions. if a particular fictional universe includes the existence of magic, is this to say that magic is considered a form of physics? if magic is not considered a form of physics, then what exactly is it? if magic is observed going against physics, which is to say, _struggling_ against physics, then both our investigations of Libertarian Free Will and compatibilism have shown that just because something struggles against something, that does not tell us for sure that it is not another form of the same thing. biology can struggle against physics, but that does not mean it is not physics. some defined concept of Free Will can struggle against physics, but if most forms of Free Will appear to boil down to biology, and some people already believe that Free Will can be physics, then there would hardly appear to be anything separating Free Will from physics either, so how can we say for sure that magic is not physics?
</div></div>

=== The will to keep living; the resolve to change fate ===

<div class="bop academic">
<div class="bop-text">in every one of the definitions of Free Will we have explored so far which has ended up coherent and functional, there is a common unifying theme: Free Will is always connected to the ability of a living thing to resist the surrounding universe. with Libertarian Free Will, Free Will is the will of a self-contained Animal to continue living. with Compatibilist Free Will, Free Will is some subset of the actual physical processes inside an Animal which perform life. with the "anti-Broken-God" definition of Free Will, Free Will is the ability of a living thing to not become subsumed into another living thing to the point none of its independent life processes are functional in the sense they were previously. with the "other" Libertarian Free Will, Free Will is the act of physically reversing damage to a particular instantiated biology. Free Will is not death. Free Will is not sheer entropy or deterioration. Free Will is not a tree falling on a baby lark and crushing the life out of it. Free Will is not the destruction of an independent entity. Free Will is not taking damage calmly and giving up. Free Will is not turning down the opportunity to change your fate. so with all of this in mind, is magic the ultimate expression of Free Will? if a given fictional process of magic is defined as having the ability to rewrite reality and change a terrible situation into a better one, would magic not be the ultimate realization of every reasonable definition of Free Will and the opposite of everything that Free Will is not?

this is the real significance of why it is relevant to bring up Shenlong as a magical entity, and not simply to explore these concepts with some kind of physically-defined artificial intelligence or robot. many of the questions we covered in the previous section could just as easily apply to robots. but with Shenlong, there is another layer of things, because within the space of particular broadly-defined limits, Shenlong has the capability to make almost anything happen. this has interesting consequences for what kinds of entities we do and do not define to have Free Will. if we try to describe Free Will with some absurdly-simple definition such as "the ability to do otherwise", then is it not worth _something_ that Shenlong can go from a state of doing nothing in particular to causing the future to become almost anything?

by one definition, a fantasy author might choose to partly describe magic as _the violation of physics_, and the transformation of physics into anything and everything it currently is not. if physics says clay statues cannot fly, magic can declare that anything physics says is wrong and make anything else happen. if physics says Harry Potter cannot levitate a teacup, or the Last Unicorn cannot spontaneously bring a dying man back to full health, or Cinderella cannot ride in a pumpkin, then magic says the opposite.
thus, if we presume that Shenlong is a being animated by magic, we should not begin by presuming there are any limitations on what he is able to think or decide. in the real world, any self-aware being that exists in physical space must be limited by the properties of the physical elements of that being such as the maximum speed of light in a vacuum and the particular structure of neurons as they physically exist in brains, but if any of these processes were subject to the rules of magic, any particular limitation of this kind would be able to be ruled out, and we would have to conclude that no particular physical process that exists in reality can necessarily put any limits on a magically-animated mind. if Shenlong is free to make a decision on any one thing in the first place, then he is in theory free to decide absolutely anything in any way, because reality simply cannot stop him. if, hypothetically, there was any cause for such an event, Shenlong would be able to spontaneously decide to disprove a mathematics conjecture he had never heard of. it is not even difficult to imagine this: a mathematician summons Shenlong. she provides nothing more than the name of the conjecture. Shenlong performs his stated duty to grant wishes and causes a very long proof to drop down from the sky. the forces of Evil are deeply frustrated that people productively spend their time on mathematics.

this is the major problem with Libertarian Free Will as it is traditionally formulated: if Free Will is literally nothing more than the capacity to defy physics equations, then it would be the case that Shenlong has Libertarian Free Will, full stop. one might even be able to begin arguing that Shenlong has more Free Will than Goku. Goku couldn't spontaneously decide to solve an unsolved mathematics conjecture just by knowing its name — he probably couldn't even spontaneously decide to solve a mathematics conjecture the normal way. Goku inherently has a lot more limitations in what he can decide to do or what he can possibly think of or remember than Shenlong does. is this to say that Goku and Vegeta do not really have Free Will, and only Shenlong has it? most people would probably not think this to be the case. if anyone in the defined cosmos of _Dragon Ball_ has Free Will, most people would assume one of those people or entities is Goku as well as his various immediate allies. when in doubt, most people will assume that a biological human being or similar fantastical person has the required kinds of embodied first-hand experience and life processes to struggle against the surrounding universe in the general way that qualifies for a reasonable definition of Free Will. yet, if Shenlong can defy the universe when summoned by other people, does that give us cause to assume there is any difference between the two of them? the more well-defined and non-contradictory our basic definitions of Free Will become, the more additional questions they seem to uncover.

one way someone could attempt to flatten out this conflict is to point out that Shenlong is not actually making the decision on what to do, and actually, Goku is the one using him. however, this does not present a complete argument that Shenlong _does not have_ Free Will. somebody can be employed at a coffee stand serving coffee, and a customer can pull up and make a particular request, but we would not be inclined to say that this alone means the food service worker has no Free Will. if we define Free Will as the thing you don't have when someone is using you for a particular narrow purpose, then we have basically tossed away the entire proletariat. do only the owners of business territories have Free Will? does someone have more Free Will the bigger the business territory is? is Jeff Bezos the only person in the whole United States who actually has Free Will?

aside from defining magic as the violation of physics, there is at least one other way we can define magic: as merely a new form of physics. this particular definition of magic will be well suited to the second variation of Libertarian Free Will that directly merges into compatibilism. if magic is simply a second body of _limiting laws of physics_ which both allows some things to happen and prohibits others, then it is not difficult to begin conceptualizing the potential limits of a magical entity through the stated prevailing rules of magical physics which create the structures that allow it to be.

physics, in general, is the study of limitations. general relativity models the limits of causality and how fast an object at one point in spacetime must move through space to meaningfully become part of the physical history of another object at another point in spacetime. Newtonian physics studies the limits of moving objects and such problems as the maximum speed or distance objects can move after receiving a particular limited force. quantum mechanics studies the limits of particular smeared paths in which fundamental particles exist — their _wave functions_ — and in general the limits of how various parts of the universe are capable of interacting with each other through quantized packets of interaction we call _fundamental forces_. chemistry studies the limits of how atoms and molecules can bond to form new substances. cellular biology studies the limits of how particular sequences of amino acids folded into proteins can function. evolutionary biology studies the limits of what kinds of body plans, or general organism shapes, can be produced given the limits of pre-existing kinds of cellular biology. almost every form of physical and biological science can be described in terms of discovering the limits of what is possible. and in turn, the topic of study for any particular field of science, the "physics of" or "biology of" a living phenomenon, is almost always phraseable as a series of wide or narrow physical limitations.

under this particular definition of _magic as physics_, the potential relationship of magic to Free Will becomes easier to qualify in what vaguely approach quantitative terms. if semi-libertarian Free Will is the ability of biology to struggle against localized deterministic processes, but magic is merely a kind of deterministic process where particular forms of magic have particular predictable effects, then it follows that the limitations of all currently-active logical systems of magic become a magical being's limitations. if somebody plays two Enchantment cards representing currently-active conditions within a game of _Magic: the Gathering_, then all the fictional beings and artifacts on the field become subject to those particular deterministic limitations. if there is any thought that Shenlong cannot think, or anything he cannot spontaneously decide to do, this limitation generally must come from the rules of magic that created him, and the limitations imposed by the surrounding objects and events of the _Dragon Ball_ universe. this conclusion is relatively straightforward. the only immediate question it raises is, at what point do the physical or magical limitations of a particular being outweigh the ability of biology to struggle against those limitations, meaning that the entity practically does not possess Free Will? does this take one limitation? five limitations? 100 limitations? how big or small does a limitation have to be? could a really big limitation on the ability to think particular thoughts still mean that Shenlong _does_ have Free Will? could a really small limitation on the ability to think mean that he does not?

it should not be difficult to see that as soon as we begin to ask how many limitations it takes for a magical being like Shenlong to no longer have Free Will, we are immediately left with the question of how this applies back to physics, and how many limitations it would take for an ordinary being like _Goku_ or _Vegeta_ to not have Free Will. the case of whether a constructed magical being like Shenlong is limited in what he can think by physics is not meaningfully different from the question of whether any of the more central or conventional living beings in the _Dragon Ball_ cosmos are limited by physics. if there is any thought that Shenlong cannot think due to the particular series of events that led to his creation, is it also necessarily the case that there are thoughts that Goku or Vegeta cannot think due to the particular series of events that led to _their_ birth or their active creation as the particular characters they are at any point in time?


[chapter unfinished]
</div></div>

<div class="bop-foot">

[*wrt] "<i>With respect to</i> the way any human or living being experiences the world, relativity is one of the very first things we all see": if you look closely, it even managed to end up at the start of this sentence.

[*p] during drafting, I had another brief thought in here about how the ball and dome were "basically performing meta-science on the scientists", but I don't think I'll be able to fit it in this chapter. I think if I ever bring up 'pataphysics it will be the time to bring this exact example back.

[*m] Factually speaking, it does not seem to ever be said or implied in <cite>Dragon Ball</cite> that Shenlong actually has a gender, but purely due to the fact he was cast with a male voice actor, for the rest of this text he will be referred to with he/him pronouns.

[*QHW] _Existential Physics_. p. xviii  [retrieve full citation later]

<dl class="bop-meta"><!-- 
{{BopFwd|Philosophical_Research:Molecular_Democracy/5.1r/2081 market-signals|link}}
; {{BopComment}} -->
{{BopCreated|2024-12-08T20:28:18Z}}
{{BopHandle|v5-1_1012_fiction-and-will}}
{{BopHandle|v5-1_1012_FreeWillNew}}
{{BopHandle|v5-1_1111_FreeWill}}
{{BopCommentTitle|v5.2 chapters/ okay, relativity is nice, but do we have free will??}}
</dl></div><!--
-->[[Category:MDem v5.2 entries]]