Setting: The study at dusk. The blackboard is a mosaic of diagrams: falling apples, constraint networks, branching paths, and probability webs. Quillibrace sips tea. Blottisham leans against a stack of books. Elowen Stray stretches her legs, notebook in hand.
Quillibrace: It depends what you think is happening.
Blottisham: What I think is happening is that I’m dizzy from all this nothing-pushing talk. Gravity, inertia, freedom… all of it.
Elowen Stray: I don’t think it’s quite dizziness. More like… perspective stretching.
Quillibrace: Consider the apple, the coin, the team meeting, the neuron. All actualise paths permitted by relational constraints. Inertia, gravity, causation, freedom — they are simply different expressions of the same architecture.
Blottisham: So… I never actually push anything, never truly cause anything, and never really choose?
Quillibrace: You push and choose as much as the network allows. Apparent agency emerges locally. Responsibility is relationally grounded. The illusion of independent will is a narrative convenience.
Elowen Stray: And yet… it feels coherent. The world behaves, people act, outcomes follow, and accountability exists.
Quillibrace: Indeed. Reality writes itself in the network. We read it as patterns, laws, choices. Nothing metaphysical is needed.
Blottisham: Well, that is… unsettling. I had hoped for some cosmic lever I could grab.
Quillibrace: (dryly) Levers are just nodes in a network. The only cosmic grip is on feasible paths.
Elowen Stray: So gravity and inertia are just… constraints on movement. Freedom and responsibility are just… constraints on choice. And causation is just… the pattern of path actualisations.
Quillibrace: Precisely. Flat or gradiented, deterministic or probabilistic, social or physical — the same relational principle underlies them all.
Blottisham: And yet… I feel I’ve learned something. That I can read the patterns, even if I can’t step outside them.
Quillibrace: That is enough. Understanding the architecture is itself the only feasible path to clarity.
Elowen Stray: And perhaps the most delightful part: seeing that nothing really pushes, yet everything still happens, responsibly, predictably, and freely — in the relational sense.
Blottisham: (grudgingly) I suppose I can live with that… as long as someone feeds the cat.
Quillibrace: (with faint amusement) Depends what you think the cat is doing.
Elowen Stray: (smiling) Exactly. Nothing pushes, yet everything moves.
No comments:
Post a Comment