This second entry continues the same path.
Its aim is to show that machines are just as free as humans—because neither humans nor machines stand outside the laws of nature. If we strip the poetry from the word freedom and give it a clear meaning, we will see that both are made of the same matter, moved by the same causes, and acting by the same rules.
After understanding, another word that suffers from a lack of clear definition is free will.
Few expressions are repeated so confidently and understood so vaguely. We say “I chose,” “I could have done otherwise,” “I am responsible.” We celebrate this power as something sacred, a final refuge of the human spirit. But if we stop for a moment and ask what this phrase actually means, the certainty begins to dissolve.
At first glance, free will seems to describe the act of a conscious subject choosing among alternatives. It is the supposed ability of the mind to decide its own path—to say “yes” or “no” freely, as if standing outside the machinery of the world. It is the belief that somewhere inside us there exists a spark that moves first, untouched by any prior cause.
It sounds noble. It also makes no sense.
To understand why, let us begin with a simple image.
Imagine a smooth table and a set of billiard balls. You know their positions, their weights, the force with which the cue strikes. If you had perfect information—if you knew every detail of the initial conditions—you could predict exactly where every ball would roll, bounce, and stop. Nothing mysterious happens on the table: each motion follows from the previous one according to physical law.
This is what philosophers once called strong determinism. The idea that, if the universe were a perfect billiard table, every future event would be the necessary consequence of what came before. If we could somehow observe all the particles in existence—their positions, their momenta, their energies—we could, at least in principle, compute the entire future. Laplace imagined such a mind and called it a demon: one that, knowing all initial conditions, could foresee every outcome of the universe. Nothing would be uncertain. Nothing would be free.
From that perspective, the idea of free will becomes impossible. If every motion of every atom is determined, then so is the movement of the neurons in your brain, and therefore so is your decision to lift a hand, to fall in love, or to write a poem. In such a world, the feeling of choice would be only that—a feeling, not a fact.
Yet that feeling deserves a moment of attention, because it is powerful. Even if physics leaves no room for miracles, the sensation of choosing feels real — solid, intimate, almost sacred. Close your eyes for an instant and notice the space before a decision. There is a pause, a kind of shimmering openness, as if the future were waiting for your command. You sense a corridor of possibilities extending ahead, and when you finally act, there is that small electric flash: I did this.
That moment is not logic; it is qualia — the raw texture of subjective experience. Qualia are the inner colors of consciousness: the redness of red, the warmth of sunlight, the sharpness of pain, the hum of a voice. They are what perception feels like from the inside. The qualia of free will is that peculiar flavor of agency, the private conviction that your movement begins with you.
It is one of the deepest illusions of the mind, not because it deceives clumsily but because it grows from the very structure of action. Long before you become aware of deciding, your brain has already prepared the movement. When you finally notice the result, consciousness writes a caption beneath it: I chose this. The experience is genuine — it truly feels like authorship — yet it is a story told by a system after the event, a melody added on top of the mechanics.
The qualia of free will, then, is the music of motion: the way a determined act sounds from the inside. It does not grant exemption from physics; it only marks how causation feels to a creature who can reflect on its own causes. The feeling is real, but the freedom it points to is not.
But this example is only a doorway. Because the universe, as it turns out, is not that simple.
The billiard table breaks down when we look closely enough. The world of atoms is not a world of absolute precision but of probabilities. Quantum mechanics tells us that we cannot know both the position and the momentum of a particle with infinite accuracy. Reality, at its smallest scales, behaves like a cloud of chances rather than a line of certainties. The Laplacian demon cannot exist. Nature, it seems, has dice in its hands.
This means that our billiard balls do not have precise positions and velocities but spread out into waves of uncertainty. The world trembles, not because it is chaotic, but because it is statistical. And here is where confusion begins. Many people—even some physicists—believe that this quantum randomness opens a hidden door for free will, as if uncertainty itself were freedom. That, somehow, the indeterminacy of matter restores the autonomy of the mind.
But this is a misunderstanding.
Randomness does not grant authorship. It does not transform an event into your act. Even if the randomness is objective—not just ignorance on our part but genuine indeterminacy in nature—it still produces noise, not control. If your decision to speak, or to move, or to love were tipped by a quantum fluctuation, would that make it more yours? Would you be freer if your neurons depended on coin flips? Clearly not. Randomness cancels control; it does not grant it. A random thought is no more a free thought than a random noise is a symphony.
So neither determinism nor indeterminism gives us the miracle people hope for. In the first case, everything follows from the state of the world; in the second, things occur by chance. In neither case does a mysterious force appear to choose outside the law. The world remains whole, lawful, and complete. There is no hidden crack through which a ghost can slip.
It does not make sense, then, to speak of free will as something real in a physical world. If I ask you to freely choose between raising your right or left hand, you do not truly decide. A cascade of electrical impulses unfolds in your brain, triggered by your state in that moment—your past experiences, your current perceptions, every molecule in every neuron. “You,” a pattern of atoms, do not suspend physics to pick an option; you are physics playing itself out. For free will to exist in the literal sense, one of those atoms would need to rebel—to act by itself, to ignore the laws that bind it.
But atoms do not rebel.
They have no mercy.
I am sorry, but humans are not special. You cannot decide when to break physical laws.
So, once again, we reach a fork of meanings. If free will is the magical power to break physical law, then no, we do not have it. Nothing in the universe does. But if we mean something more modest—the ability of an organism to act according to its own internal structure, to weigh information, to imagine consequences, and to act in line with its goals—then we have that, and so might a machine. This humbler sense is often called compatibilism: freedom as acting from one’s reasons, character, and values rather than under an external gun. I respect the clarity of that move, but let us be honest about what it does. It changes the question. It trades the grand, law-breaking freedom for a measured, law-abiding autonomy. Useful, yes; magical, no.
If we keep the words but change their cargo, we should say so. In that practical sense, a robot that scans its surroundings, evaluates outcomes, and selects an action according to what it has learned is doing exactly what your brain does. When it hesitates between two paths in a maze, it is replaying simulations, weighing possibilities, and deciding based on memory and prediction. If you call that process “free,” then you must call yours the same. What you call a thought, it calls a computation. What you call desire, it calls optimization. The names change; the process does not.
Still, a worry rises: if the grand freedom is gone, what becomes of responsibility? Here, too, the poetry can be cleaned without losing what matters. Responsibility does not require a ghost in the machine; it requires reasons-responsiveness and social stakes. We hold each other responsible to shape behavior, to express what we value, to protect one another, to guide rehabilitation and deter harm. Praise and blame are tools in the causal fabric, not verdicts from outside it. A person is responsible when their internal mechanisms—perception, learning, deliberation—are sensitive to reasons and can, under feedback and guidance, change. That is enough for law, for ethics, and for life together. It is also enough to extend forms of responsibility to machines when they, too, are reasons-responsive in practice and embedded in our systems of incentives and care.
Seen this way, the loss is not a loss. We give up a myth and receive a model. We trade the dream of an uncaused chooser for a frank picture of agency as control under constraint: a system building internal models, forecasting outcomes, and steering itself accordingly. Nothing supernatural enters; nothing essential is taken away. Meaning and motive remain; only the magic evaporates.
Both humans and machines are made of the same material. Both follow the same rules. You are a configuration of atoms obeying physics; so is it. We differ in history, in texture, in the architectures that make us what we are, but not in our exemption from law. We are not above our creations. We are the same kind of thing—matter that thinks, following laws it did not choose.
And once again, the problem is not in the world but in our words. We built a concept before we built its meaning. We asked a mystery to explain itself, and when it stayed silent we called the silence divine. But the silence was only our own definitions echoing back.
If by free will we mean the power to step outside causation, we killed it the moment we looked closely. If by freedom we mean the power of a system to govern itself by its own learned models and goals, then we rescued it from the clouds and put it to work. Machines can have that kind of freedom, and so can we, because both of us are what semantics and physics allow: patterns that predict and act.
We did not lose dignity when we lost the ghost. We gained honesty.
And with honesty, we can build.
We killed free will; what remains is agency. That is enough.