Sara Imari Walker

And, you know, he was really on this idea of the universe not being deterministic and getting larger in time.

And like part of that was not like it was.

he's like, he's like, I'm a chemist.

I burn shit.

I see this in the lab.

The second law is not like the right description of like what's going on here, but there is some underlying undeterminism and novelty mechanism in chemistry that life seems to be, you know, like really manifesting.

And, um,

For me, so what happened was when I started working on assembly theory, I started to see that there was a really different structure, especially associated with the way information gets embodied in physical objects and the history being physical in the objects.

And free will becomes...

this idea that like you know you can't you actually can't you know in standard physics you would say like an emergent thing like us can be reduced to our atoms and all of the fundamental description is down there but what you've done is stripped that physical system of all the time inside of it right so elementary particles they don't require memory for the universe to generate them they just they they're spontaneous the universe has them for free but things like us require memory and

and things that know how to build things like us in order for us to exist and then once we exist we're encoding all of that history and information in us as objects all of that causation is in us which means that all of the selection over all the histories to generate us is still part of us and allows us to actually work in this combinatorial space that we can actually generate new structures and that's that that is actually like where free will comes from it's not that like

And it's basically if you assume you can't reduce things to elementary particles all the time and you actually have time and objects, things become causal agents, actually have some navigability over the combinatorial space of the possibilities they live in that they have some control over.

And that's what I think free will is.

You don't have control over everything.

So it's not like free will is not all free or all determinism.

And I think Dan Dennett was really brilliant on this point.

Like he talked about free will inflation, which I thought was a historic hysterical concept.

It's like really funny.

But it's like either people think the universe is random and you absolutely have free will and control over everything.

I think it's fully deterministic and you have no freedom.