Free Will

The Senior Common Room was enjoying a rare interval of tranquillity.

Outside, autumn rain drifted gently across the college quadrangle. Inside, the fire crackled softly beneath portraits of former masters who appeared, almost without exception, to have died disappointed in someone.

Professor Quillibrace sat reading a monograph entitled Temporal Necessity and Modal Collapse in Post-Spinozist Determinism, which he appeared to be annotating chiefly with expressions of personal betrayal.

Miss Elowen Stray was writing notes nearby.

Mr Blottisham entered abruptly carrying a bowl of cereal.

“I’ve done it,” he announced.

Quillibrace did not look up.

“Done what?”

“Disproven determinism.”

Quillibrace slowly lowered the monograph and regarded him over the rims of his glasses.

“With bran flakes.”

Blottisham nodded gravely.

“You see before you,” he said, lifting the bowl slightly, “the collapse of mechanistic causality.”

Miss Stray looked up with cautious interest.

“What happened?”

Blottisham sat down triumphantly.

“For eleven consecutive years,” he said, “I have eaten the same breakfast cereal every Thursday.”

“Yes,” said Quillibrace. “The college kitchen staff refer to it as ‘the event horizon.’”

“This morning,” Blottisham continued, “I suddenly chose a different cereal for no reason whatsoever.”

He gestured dramatically toward the bowl.

“Chocolate crescents.”

A silence followed.

Quillibrace blinked once.

“And from this,” he said carefully, “you inferred the falsity of determinism.”

“Obviously.”

“I see.”

Blottisham leaned forward.

“If the universe were fully determined by prior causes, my breakfast behaviour should have been perfectly predictable.”

Quillibrace nodded faintly.

“And yet you selected processed sugar geometry.”

“Exactly!”

Quillibrace removed his glasses and polished them with the slow precision of a man attempting to delay reality.

“My dear Blottisham,” he said at last, “determinism does not mean events become predictable to you personally.”

Blottisham frowned.

“But I surprised myself.”

“Yes,” said Quillibrace. “You frequently do.”

Miss Stray hid a smile.

Blottisham persisted.

“No, but surely genuine spontaneity disproves strict causality.”

Quillibrace sighed softly.

“The fact that you do not know the causes of an action does not establish the absence of causes.”

“But the choice felt completely free.”

“Indeed,” said Quillibrace. “Human consciousness is often the last department informed of its own operations.”

Miss Stray glanced thoughtfully into the fire.

“The difficulty,” she said carefully, “may lie in conflating unpredictability with metaphysical freedom.”

Blottisham looked encouraged.

“Yes! Precisely!”

“No,” said Miss Stray gently. “Again, not precisely.”

Blottisham deflated slightly.

She continued:

“A system may be difficult to predict for many reasons — complexity, incomplete information, recursive self-reference, probabilistic dynamics, or limitations in observation. None of these automatically establish freedom in the strong metaphysical sense.”

Quillibrace nodded approvingly.

“Quite so. Weather systems are notoriously unpredictable. One does not therefore conclude that thunderstorms possess moral autonomy.”

Blottisham crossed his arms.

“But I could have chosen differently.”

“Could you?” asked Quillibrace mildly.

“Yes.”

“In exactly the same universe?”

“Yes.”

“With exactly the same prior conditions?”

“Yes.”

Quillibrace regarded him quietly.

“My dear fellow, you are now attempting to smuggle metaphysical indeterminacy into breakfast.”

Blottisham opened his mouth.

Paused.

Closed it again.

Miss Stray spoke softly.

“There may also be a hidden ambiguity in what we mean by ‘could have done otherwise.’”

Blottisham pointed at her eagerly.

“Exactly!”

She ignored this.

“In ordinary life, the phrase usually means the system possessed multiple available potentials relative to its organisation and constraints. But in metaphysical debates, people often reinterpret it as requiring the entire universe to have unfolded differently while remaining somehow identical.”

Quillibrace smiled faintly.

“A manoeuvre popular among philosophers because it converts perfectly intelligible experiences into impossible cosmological riddles.”

Blottisham frowned at his cereal.

“But it felt like I interrupted causality.”

Quillibrace leaned back.

“My dear Blottisham, causality is not a railway timetable occasionally disrupted by acts of bran-based rebellion.”

The fire crackled gently.

Rain whispered against the windows.

At last Blottisham spoke again.

“So you’re saying my cereal choice was determined?”

“I am saying,” replied Quillibrace carefully, “that your inability to identify the relational conditions contributing to an event does not magically place the event outside relational organisation.”

Blottisham looked thoughtful.

Then suddenly his eyes widened.

“I see!” he cried. “So free will is deterministic unpredictability!”

Quillibrace stared silently into the middle distance with the exhausted expression of a man watching a piano fall slowly down a staircase in conceptual slow motion.

Miss Stray quietly reached over and moved the sherry bottle closer to him without a word.