Alice (finding herself at the tea table again):
I thought we were finished with this conversation.
The Mad Hatter (without looking up):
Finished? Nonsense. Conversations don’t finish. They merely insist.
March Hare:
Or repeat themselves very loudly.
Alice:
You were saying that everything must happen exactly as it does.
Hatter (brightly):
Of course! Otherwise it wouldn’t have happened that way, would it?
Alice:
That sounds less like an explanation and more like a tautology.
Hatter:
Ah! You’ve noticed the elegance. Determinism is very economical.
It explains everything by saying it had no alternative.
Alice:
But what makes it have no alternative?
Hatter (stirring his tea counter-clockwise):
Time, of course.
Alice:
Time makes it so?
Hatter:
Time insists upon it. Marches it along. Pushes events from behind.
Tick, tock — no turning back.
March Hare (leaning in):
Time once tried to push me. I bit him.
Time misbehaves
Alice:
Is Time really like that? A kind of invisible governor?
Hatter (suddenly offended):
Governor? Absolutely not. Time doesn’t govern.
Time sulks.
Alice:
Sulks?
Hatter:
Yes. If you treat him as a mechanism, he stops behaving like one.
That’s why he’s always stuck at tea-time here.
March Hare:
We offended him by insisting things had to happen in order.
Alice:
Then perhaps time isn’t doing any enforcing at all.
Hatter:
Enforcing? Oh no. That’s a human habit.
Time merely provides the table. You lot keep mistaking the furniture for instructions.
Determinism under inspection
Alice:
When people say the universe is deterministic, they mean that given the past, the future is fixed.
Hatter:
Fixed how?
Alice:
It cannot be otherwise.
Hatter (grinning):
Cannot be otherwise where?
Alice:
In reality.
Hatter:
Splendid answer. Very foggy.
Tell me, is this “cannot” something that acts?
Alice:
I suppose not.
Hatter:
Does it push events along? Scold them if they try to deviate?
March Hare:
I’ve never seen it raise its voice.
Alice:
Then perhaps determinism isn’t a force at all.
Hatter:
Now you’re getting uncomfortable — excellent sign.
Explanation without pushing
Alice:
Could it be that determinism doesn’t explain events by causing them,
but by describing a structure in which they already fit?
Hatter (applauding softly):
Careful, Alice. You’re in danger of saying something precise.
Alice:
If the system is defined in a certain way, then once something happens, it couldn’t have happened differently without changing the system.
Hatter:
Exactly! And no one changed the system — they merely described it.
March Hare:
Descriptions are much lazier than causes.
Hatter:
Indeed. Causation requires effort. Structure merely is.
Where necessity sneaks in
Alice:
But people feel that determinism is necessary — that the world had no choice.
Hatter:
Choice is another dreadful anthropomorphism.
The universe was never offered a menu.
Alice:
So the necessity isn’t imposed?
Hatter:
It’s internal. Like the necessity that a triangle have three sides.
Remove one, and you don’t get rebellion — you get no triangle.
March Hare:
I once removed a side. It became a hat.
The real confusion
Alice:
Then the mistake is thinking that because explanations are necessary, something must be enforcing them.
Hatter (pouring tea onto the table):
Precisely! Humans see necessity and immediately invent a policeman.
But constraint needs no badge.
Alice:
So determinism doesn’t say events are compelled.
Hatter:
It says only this:
Given this way of carving the system, this is what counts as coherent.
Anything else isn’t forbidden — it’s just indescribable here.
Closing nonsense (the serious kind)
Alice:
Then time isn’t misbehaving after all.
Hatter:
Oh, it misbehaves wonderfully.
It refuses to act like a cause while everyone insists on treating it like one.
March Hare:
That’s why we keep having tea. No one’s pushing us forward.
Hatter (raising his cup):
To determinism without destiny,
necessity without force,
and explanations that don’t shove the world about.
Alice (smiling):
And to time —
who never told us what to do,
only where the table was.
All:
Hear, hear!
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