Philosophical Research:MDem/5.2/1111 FreeWill
okay, relativity is nice, but do we have free will??
There is zero difference between predictable and unpredictable things actually
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. This die is one of my favorite dice, you might say, 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. 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 not cooperate.
This is very curious. We know a die does not think, and we know a die does not want anything or refuse anything. 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 does not care 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 correctly 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 better outcomes than a human would give us in a simple unbiased die?
Or could it instead be that a human being is similar to a die, 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[edit]
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.
Existential Physics, 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. [*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.
what does it mean to find a Shiny Pidgey?[edit]
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 Entei 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?
quantum mechanics for tiny bird Pokémon[edit]
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 force, or 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 lost 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?
metaphysics and alchemy for tiny bird Pokémon[edit]
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.
Does a perfectly-round dome have free will?[edit]
_determinism_, much like _phenomenology_, has two entirely different definitions depending on whether one is discussing it in the context of traditional philosophy or modern science. in traditional philosophy, determinism is often taken to be the same thing as _predetermination_; in science, determinism is taken to be approximately the same thing as _short-term predictability_.
most people that you will run into tend not to have any clear understanding of what determinism actually refers to in physics. this even includes some number of scientists who make use of models based on determinism. not all scientists and science communicators are guilty of this, of course, or it would not make any sense to say that the majority of the group who had first defined the term were using the term _determinism_ wrong. but if physics really does have a unique scientific concept called determinism, it is important for us to have a good idea of what that is before we go opposing this concept to any particular logical concept of Free Will.
if we want to test whether scientists truly understand the basic principles of science, all we will need is a simple apparatus consisting of one maximally round ball and one maximally smooth dome. assuming that the ball and the dome are as perfect as we can make them, and the ball is at rest on the top of the dome with nothing actively pushing it to accelerate, classical Newtonian mechanics suggest that the ball should remain still. but almost any time anybody actually tries to build one of these domes, the ball always at some point ends up rolling off the dome. why is this? is it merely because we have not been able to remove all the forces in the room and properly make the ball and the dome perfect in shape? or is there some kind of more fundamental problem going on? [*p]
certainly, if we try to check the experimental setup for imperfections, there will always be some sort of tiny uncontrolled factor within the room to discover. in real-life conditions it is trivial for tiny imperfections in controlled environments to exist without there being any cause of them we actually know of due to the fact that gaining any information about any object requires physical processes and nearly every act of gaining information about a physical environment alters that environment. shine a lamp on a surface to observe it and you may warm it up. try to observe a photon with something the size of a photon and you may as well be shooting a cue ball at a pool ball to observe the position or velocity of a pool ball — by the time you hit the pool ball it's already moving with a given velocity from where you hit it, or knocked away from its existing directional movement. set up a seemingly perfect dome carefully calibrated with mathematics, and unless you know everything about the air, the atoms of the dome, and the ball sitting on top of the dome, you can almost /predict/ that an unseen "excessive pit" or "excessive air molecule" will interfere with your plans and tip the ball to one side of the dome allowing gravity to win. in the field of physics within fluids, there is a process called _Brownian motion_ in which all the molecules within a fluid tend to hit dissolved particles in a statistically random pattern, yet one which over time often tends to eventually cluster collisions in particular directions, and push particles to drift; if all the collisions are indeed random, then there is no filter preventing any molecule from hitting any particular side, and no reason a bunch of molecules hitting one particular side cannot happen. at a certain point, it almost begins to feel like unpredictable events have become totally predictable because it's so often that at least one of them will menace us eventually.
what kind of predictability are the ball and the dome showing, exactly? by a Newtonian model, the ball and the dome would not be predicted to be doing _anything_ unless, for instance, we assume the Brownian motion produced by air molecules is a major factor in the ball's movement and we somehow add this into the model. air molecules similar to helium atoms count as classical as long as nothing interesting is happening with protons, neutrons or electrons, so this is something we can get away with if we are willing to make our Newtonian mechanics much more complex. with that said, the minimal model of this system would look something like an unmoving ball on top of a dome which is to be struck from some unknown direction by some minimum number of air molecules at an unknown time, and proceed down the dome in a direction which is unknown at first but directly depends on the unknown direction from which it was pushed. the dome system feels like it has a similar kind of predictability to a Pokémon trainer walking into a patch of grass and eventually finding a Pokémon, with the exact Pokémon that appears and time or place it appears being apparently random yet with some sort of Pokémon showing up eventually. could an LCRNG be used to simulate the dome system? as funny as it may sound, an LCRNG algorithm is really just a kind of power series, so by one definition an LCRNG given a particular seed _is_ a kind of function; it does not have multiple y values for any x value, and always returns something. so, why not use a pseudorandom number generator to simulate one particular hypothetical trial of the experiment, and then give it different seeds to simulate others? to do so would create a kind of mathematical _superposition_ of different scenarios, slowly modeling every possible arrangement of air molecules and every possible path down the dome. as we overlay enough of these hypothetical trials on top of each other, we might begin to end up with a formula for the average time over all trials for the ball to initially start moving.
it is severely interesting that if we so much as simulate a system where many free-floating moving parts are expected to move in an apparently random pattern, we end up with something that looks for all the world like a quantum wave function. quantum-scale phenomena are infamous for being "in two places at once" (often two electron energy levels), for disrupting our ordinary understanding of time by snowballing fuzziness and imprecision up toward large scales to the point they can supposedly leave a cat both alive and dead at least specifically according to how much _information we have about it_ if we don't observe it. this is the key thing many people forget in respect to quantum mechanics: having no information about the cat does not by itself mean there is a possibility it is alive. if we are not able to observe the cat and collect information, we will have no information it is _not_ alive, but simply having no information it is _not_ does not immediately imply it _is_. here, as explained in the previous chapter, we can begin to see an obvious if vague connection between quantum mechanics and general relativity. in general relativity, the experience of time is defined within the process of isolated sections of space exchanging interactions with each other, and how closely suited or far removed these interactions are from being able to produce causal results which transfer an observational piece of information about the originating area of space; any light we observe or information we know is only something we have if it can physically reach us, regardless of what may or may not be happening behind the barrier of causality. relativity itself is easily capable of wrecking mathematical predictions — all that has to happen is some physical event taking place over a light-year away needs to be not quite what we expected. scientists can predict what should be happening a light-year away, it can be that whatever is happening over there is not aligned with predictions, and from that point on, the journey that signs of that particular event take from the place a light-year away to earth will transform itself into a mathematical superposition. one possibility for what could happen is the event will align with earth's predictions when light finally hits earth. another possibility is that it will turn out in some totally different way. in reality the event only happens one way by the time light has reached earth, but until that moment the whole _history_ of an event happening a light-year away and light moving across space to finally reach earth looks a whole lot like the ball-and-dome simulation, the ball seeming to go many different possible ways down the dome at once. at first we have no information. then we have a vast array of different possibilities. then an observation collides with us and information reaches us. then there is some particular single, non-superpositional account of history. it would appear that it is not just quantum phenomena that take on a particular state when they collide with an instrument of measurement, but in fact, we are constantly measuring history, and history is measuring us.
the basic nature of the Vegeta effect should be more than clear by now. its origin is the separation of physical spacetime itself into different coinciding histories. at small scales, light can become separated from space resulting in the suspension of all causality until photons or other such fundamental interactions actually hit something. at larger scales, free-floating objects such as pseudorandom power series algorithms, clocks, and human beings all proceed on their own differing paths sometimes resulting in problems when these paths intersect with each other. the physical definition of _history_ in the narrow sense of spacetime and the subjectively-experienced sense of _history_ that human beings participate in are only truly different and separate from each other in terms of what scale they occur at and the unique characteristics of that physical scale.
so, it would appear that the ball and the dome create _history_, in a particular material sense. inanimate objects such as dice and domes can more or less exert Vegeta effects before they have anything resembling consciousness or any kind of individual will. they appear unpredictable at first, but they operate according to what are actually a relatively-predictable series of mechanics, such that given as much as a pseudorandom number generator which can project _one_ hypothetical path the system will take, we can create a generalized overview of what the system will do and show that despite a bunch of unknown initial information, it _is_ ultimately more or less predictable.
within physics, _determinism_ is the concept that processes in reality can be predicted through the use of a fixed mathematical function. for some particular collection of objects in reality, such as a ball and a dome or a collection of helium atoms in a room, scientists will create an equation which is able to model the general shape of the behavior of that particular collection of objects under particular conditions: if the helium atoms within half of a room are warm and the other half is cold, a thermodynamics equation says the fast-moving atoms will drift to the other side and the room will eventually even out. this is determinism. determinism is almost the same thing as a particular process in the physical world having an understandable mathematical function which describes that process from beginning to end. the equation does not have to be perfect. there is almost always some tiny gap between a typical classical physics equation and its corresponding real-life system, and as much as scientists may later try to add adjustments to equations to make them more accurate, nobody necessarily expects physics equations to predict the results of a particular process exactly with zero margin of error. this is to say, there is always a certain very small difference between physical mathematics and physical reality. to say an equation is perfectly deterministic and predictable is not to assign that exact same level of certainty to physical reality itself.
aside from the distinction between mathematics and reality, there is another detail very important to the definition of scientific determinism that must not be glossed over: when we say that determinism applies to a category of _processes_, we mean events of a particular size and scale with a particular beginning and end. if a ball is tossed into the air horizontally and then lands, the arc of this ball can be considered a physical _process_ of the ball interacting with forces capable of accelerating it and the earth. a process is finite. a process typically consists of a particular collection of atoms and a particular collection of things capable of changing their current motion. by one definition, a _process_ involving particular things is near-synonymous with an open or closed _system_ of things; a _system_ is a bunch of objects interacting continually over time, and a _process_ is a bunch of objects interacting either for a long or short time. this has a critical implication for the relationship between processes and the overall universe: whenever we show that some particular localized process like a ball flying through the air is predictable, it does not necessarily by itself show that we can predict the formation or future trajectory of the entire universe. it could hypothetically be the case that this is true, that we can guess facts about the development of the whole universe in much the same way as we created a mathematical superposition about the development of the ball sitting on top of the dome and thought to be bombarded with air molecules. however, it could also hypothetically be the case that the universe is fundamentally a collection of many separate interacting objects which never properly reduce into a single process or system, because all of the separate objects, whether these separate objects might be best identified as fundamental particles or chunks of Planck-scale spacetime or anything else, always have the capacity to de-synchronize from each other's paths and create tiny relativistic rifts between each other's material-histories. this is only a hypothesis, and just because we do not have clear information that it is false, that is not to say we know it is true. nonetheless, the theories and findings associated with relativity that exist so far should make us question whether the universe as a whole is the same kind of thing as a simple system of a ball and a dome, or a ball and the earth. at each scale of reality, the mechanics associated with that scale tend to change, dropping some physical behaviors from the previous scale and acquiring new ones. could it actually be that the very assumption of localized processes being _deterministic_ in the sense of having a particular equation for their behavior is one that is _not physically possible_ with respect to the overall universe?
this is the problem with the common assumption that _determinism_ is easily interchangeable with _predetermination_. most philosophers, and even a few scientists, commonly make the logical error that just because a portion of the universe has particular characteristics of determinist predictability and appears to conform to the same overall set of physical laws that apply to other similar local portions of the universe that this must be the same kind of determinist predictability that applies to the overall universe. we've observed entropy everywhere we can see, we've observed energy conservation everywhere we can see, we've observed the cosmological constant all of these places, so does this mean all our overlapping observations of physical laws, constants, and also determinism apply directly to the overarching object we call the universe? in reality, what we seem to observe is that in various different parts of the universe the same small-scale physical laws emerge from the same small-scale physical things, and the same small-scale physical laws stack up to the same large-scale physical laws. there is a very important detail hiding between the lines of this observation: in some senses, the whole universe containing the same small-scale physical things is something of a favorable coincidence. looking at what quantum mechanics and relativity can each do to our ability to know anything, we should be surprised that there are not parts of the universe that have completely different small-scale structure and stack up to completely different large-scale behaviors that we simply didn't notice because those regions of space were too far away from us. to be clear, we have no evidence that this is realistically possible, so it _is_ more of an imagined philosophical problem than a real problem, but given the very limits of physical reality on us observing it without physical interaction, there definitely does exist a remaining philosophy-of-science problem as far as the limits of observation.
now that we have outlined the difference between narrow-sense _determinism_ and broad-sense _predetermination_, it should be clear that bringing up determinism does not ultimately do much to shed any light on either the existence or nonexistence of Free Will. assuming that there really was such a thing as Free Will, we would never be able to tell if Free Will did or did not exist if it happened the whole universe was subject to predetermination. people like to claim that the existence of predetermination would neatly rule out Free Will, but if anyone ever claims this, they have not really been thinking about it. in a universe which was seemingly physically-identical to our own but subject to predetermination, people would still roll dice, and all of those dice would still appear to be random. people would still not be able to predict the actions of other people, even if each person was pre-set to move on a certain path. in our world as we experience it, a pseudorandom number generator can go down a pre-set path of numbers, and yet present a series of events which is totally arbitrary to the point of appearing unpredictable and random. this would be true even if our universe was _not_ subject to predetermination and people somehow possessed Free Will — people would get fooled by the apparent randomness of pseudorandom number generators in either universe. if human beings cannot fundamentally tell the difference between artificial things that are intentionally predetermined and things that are not predetermined, how would an average person ever be able to tell a universe that was subject to predetermination from one which was not? things would appear to happen arbitrarily and unpredictably in either universe. and we know this is the case because as long as a universe has the same overall laws of physics as our universe, even a predetermined universe would still have spacetime, and it would still have relativity and Vegeta effects.
put more succinctly, if we are ever to tell whether Free Will exists or characterize its effect on people and relationships, the first thing we must understand is that predetermination has nearly no effect on everyday human experience compared to the local and immediate interactions between separate material objects with separate perspectives. the existence or nonexistence of Free Will and the characteristics of human decision-making all exist _within_ interactions and relationships.
so, to get back to our previous question. are the ball and the dome _deterministic_? well, that depends on how you personally feel about systems with finite possibilities for generating material-histories and mathematical superpositions. if superpositions don't scare you, and you don't think a dome is identical with the universe, then there is no real difference between determinism and the so-called "indeterministic" behavior of objects like the ball and dome. to paraphrase the words of a popular edited comic, there is zero difference between predictable and unpredictable things.
Does Shenlong have free will?[edit]
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?
The will to keep living; the resolve to change fate[edit]
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]
[*wrt] "With respect to 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 Dragon Ball 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]