This is a warning. Please read
carefully.
By now you've probably seen a
Predictor; millions of them have been sold by the time you're reading this. For
those who haven't seen one, it's a small device, like a remote for opening your
car door. Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes
if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you
press the button.
Most people say that when they
first try it, it feels like they're playing a strange game, one where the goal
is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it's easy to play. But when
you try to break the rules, you find that you can't. If you try to press the
button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no
matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed.
If you wait for the flash, intending to keep from pressing the button
afterwards, the flash never appears. No matter what you do, the light always
precedes the button press. There's no way to fool a Predictor.
The heart of each Predictor is a
circuit with a negative time delay — it sends a signal back in time. The full
implications of the technology will become apparent later, when negative delays
of greater than a second are achieved, but that's not what this warning is
about. The immediate problem is that Predictors demonstrate that there's no
such thing as free will.
There have always been arguments
showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based
on pure logic. Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one
ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too
powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and
that's what a Predictor provides.
Typically, a person plays with a
Predictor compulsively for several days, showing it to friends, trying various
schemes to outwit the device. The person may appear to lose interest in it, but
no one can forget what it means — over the following weeks, the implications of
an immutable future sink in. Some people, realizing that their choices don't
matter, refuse to make any choices at all. Like a legion of Bartleby the
Scriveners, they no longer engage in spontaneous action. Eventually, a third of
those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won't feed
themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma. They'll
track motion with their eyes, and change position occasionally, but nothing
more. The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.
Before people started playing
with Predictors, akinetic mutism was very rare, a result of damage to the
anterior cingulate region of the brain. Now it spreads like a cognitive plague.
People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some
unspeakable lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human
logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we've all
encountered: the idea that free will doesn't exist. It just wasn't harmful
until you believed it.
Doctors try arguing with the
patients while they still respond to conversation. We had all been living
happy, active lives before, they reason, and we hadn't had free will then
either. Why should anything change? “No action you took last month was any more
freely chosen than one you take today,” a doctor might say. “You can still
behave that way now.” The patients invariably respond, “But now I know.” And
some of them never say anything again.
Some will argue that the fact the
Predictor causes this change in behaviour means that we do have free will. An
automaton cannot become discouraged, only a free-thinking entity can. The fact
that some individuals descend into akinetic mutism whereas others do not just
highlights the importance of making a choice.
Unfortunately, such reasoning is
faulty: every form of behaviour is compatible with determinism. One dynamic
system might fall into a basin of attraction and wind up at a fixed point,
whereas another exhibits chaotic behaviour indefinitely, but both are
completely deterministic.
I'm transmitting this warning to
you from just over a year in your future: it's the first lengthy message
received when circuits with negative delays in the megasecond range are used to
build communication devices. Other messages will follow, addressing other issues.
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It's essential that
you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know that they don't.
The reality isn't important: what's important is your belief, and believing the
lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on
self-deception. Perhaps it always has.
And yet I know that, because free
will is an illusion, it's all predetermined who will descend into akinetic
mutism and who won't. There's nothing anyone can do about it — you can't choose
the effect the Predictor has on you. Some of you will succumb and some of you
won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions. So why did I
do it?
Because I had no choice.
