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

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

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<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]
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[*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]

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