Setting: A modest study, books stacked high, chalk dust in the air. Quillibrace sits comfortably, fingers steepled. Blottisham paces. Elowen Stray lounges in a chair, notebook in hand, occasionally scribbling.
Quillibrace: It depends what you think is happening.
Blottisham: What I think is happening is perfectly clear. Things fall. Things move. People choose. Pushes, pulls, all of it. It’s obvious.
Elowen Stray: I don’t think that’s quite it… but I can’t yet say why.
Quillibrace: Right. Consider the apple. It falls. Now, the instinct is to imagine gravity pushing it, a force acting invisibly, a kind of cosmic hand.
Blottisham: Ah! There it is. I knew it. Forces. Simple. Cause and effect.
Quillibrace: Only, the apple doesn’t require a hand. It follows paths allowed by relational constraints — mass distributions, environmental configuration, minimal re-cutting costs.
Elowen Stray: So… it falls because the architecture of the world permits that path? Not because someone or something pulls it?
Quillibrace: Precisely.
Blottisham: Hmph. So nothing pushes. That’s… a little unnerving. I mean, if nothing pushes, then what about choice? I choose to… to… decide! Surely that counts?
Quillibrace: Choice is local re-cutting. You actualise one feasible path among many. No metaphysical agent needed. The “I” is a narrative overlay.
Elowen Stray: And yet it feels like me choosing… because the landscape of possibilities has structure, and I traverse it.
Quillibrace: Exactly. Freedom is not absence of constraint; it is structured availability. Constraints define what is feasible — your so-called agency is a manifestation of that structure.
Blottisham: So everything is… emergent. Gravity, inertia, falling apples, choices… all just… patterns?
Quillibrace: Patterns in relational networks of constraint. Gradiented, flat, or complex. Inertia is persistence along flat availability; gravity is movement along a gradient; freedom is the selection of feasible paths. All the same principle.
Elowen Stray: And responsibility? Surely we can still hold someone accountable?
Quillibrace: Responsibility emerges where nodes significantly modulate feasible paths. You are accountable because your actualisation affects others’ possibilities, not because you have some independent will.
Blottisham: So… I can never really push anything, I never really choose… and yet I’m still responsible? Ridiculous.
Quillibrace: Only ridiculous if you think the world requires pushes or hidden faculties. Reality is subtler. Much subtler.
Elowen Stray: I think I see it. It’s like… the world is a network, and what we call causes, motions, choices, and responsibilities are all just traces along its paths.
Quillibrace: Indeed. You might say the world writes itself as it unfolds, and we merely read the patterns.
Blottisham: Well. That’s one way to ruin a good apple story.
Quillibrace: (dryly) Depends on whether you prefer apples pushed or freely actualised.
Elowen Stray: (smiling) I’m inclined to say: both. And yet neither.
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