{"id":11014,"date":"2026-05-06T15:15:14","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T23:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/?p=11014"},"modified":"2026-05-06T15:36:30","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T23:36:30","slug":"a-vanilla-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/archives\/11014","title":{"rendered":"A Vanilla Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The past two days here have been unseasonably warm. Depending on who you ask, two unseasonably warm days in a row may be a portent of the end of times, or an unexpectedly delightful amuse-bouche<\/em> of summer. HW leans toward the former, I the latter<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can you believe that May 1st marked three years since we moved here? Leaving Alaska and moving here involved an interdependent sequence of decisions on our part, of course, but in the larger scheme of things those decisions don’t feel, to me anyway, like choices, commonly understood. The past three years, and for that matter the past sixty-six years of my experience on earth, instead feels to me like it was predetermined. Not in any woo-woo spiritual sense, but in the sense that I don’t feel like I<\/em> had agency<\/em> directing the course of my life, where agency, as I understand what people mean by it, is the ability of an individual human brain to “choose” among alternative futures

Consider: I enter an ice cream store, place an order for a single scoop of vanilla in a waffle cone. In doing so, I choose a future state of the universe to be one in which I am seated outside on a park bench enjoyably lapping a vanilla ice cream cone. As opposed to an alternative state, where I am doing the same, except raspberry ice cream<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think about what work “I choose” is doing here, versus, simply (or not so simply!), “the speech center of my brain activated the vocal cords to activate the muscles of the mouth to form and speak the words (‘I will have vanilla’).” As a first take, many people will find nothing essentially different between the two descriptions of what’s going on. They may consider me daft, or excessively pedantic for the latter, but whatever. However, I would put it to you that those same people would insist there is something<\/em> more going on upstream in the brain, more than just the laws of physics operating on material matter, the neuronal milieu, that would justify their defense of “I”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people would insist that “I choose” refers to something apart from<\/em> the material brain, something in addition to it that interferes with the material universe, and in effect alters the state of the neurons in a manner not predictable – not even in principle<\/em> – under the immutable laws of physics alone. Such people, in doing so, necessarily commit themselves to a belief in mysticism. I don’t mean that as a smear, merely as a way to call out two divergent beliefs that people hold regarding how nature works. Some of these people may push back on the charge of mysticism. They may acknowledge the laws of physics are real, yet say that there is something<\/em> so incomprehensible about the human brain and how it works that it may as well be considered apart from the material universe. People like myself, however, who hold to strict, materialistic beliefs as to how all<\/em> of nature works, will feel no urgent need to fill the gaps of uncertainty in modern neuroscience (there are many), certainly not with superstition<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not as if the atoms of carbon, in an amino acid, in a peptide, in a neuron, in the brain, interact any differently than the carbon atoms in a grain of dust on, say, Jupiter\u2019s moon, Io. Both the neuron and dust grain are composed of elements on the periodic table and sourced from the ancestral matter. Both exist in the material universe. Both are subject to the same immutable laws of physics. Organization is different but so what. There is nothing controversial about any of this. If the immutable laws of physics can be used to predict the future state of a grain of dust, then surely, in principle<\/em>, could the same could be used to precisely predict the future state of a neuron, and in due course be scaled up to the state of eighty-six billion of them. So by knowing the position and velocity of all particles at time T, that alone could, again, in principle<\/em>, be used to predict the position and velocities of all particles at T+1, aka the future. And I would put it to you that that is all you\u2019d need to precisely predict my vanilla future. Granted, it would be a lot<\/em><\/strong> to need to know; an incomprehensible<\/em> lot to know, especially as the interval, T > T+1, becomes very, very small (a femptosecond, say). But think about what it would mean, so far as the human brain is concerned. It would mean that the brain is a transition state machine, that operates automatically<\/strong><\/em> in its representation of one state of the universe to the next. It would mean that I<\/em> don’t choose<\/em> my future because there is no “I” in the brain, no conductor pulling the strings as it were – that is: I<\/em> don’t direct my thoughts, my brain automatically creates thoughts which direct my actions. It means that some time in the distant future our descendants will discuss among themselves how weird it must have been way back when for humans to think they were “responsible” for choosing their actions, believing they were apart from<\/em> nature rather than part of<\/em> it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The past two days here have been unseasonably warm. Depending on who you ask, two unseasonably warm days in a row may be a portent of the end of times, or an unexpectedly delightful amuse-bouche of summer. HW leans toward the former, I the latter Can you believe that May 1st marked three years since we moved […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wikipediapreview_detectlinks":true,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11014"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11033,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11014\/revisions\/11033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rknibbe.com\/Wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}