Future Blogposts Testing the Limits of Free Will

If you don’t know why you are reading this, there are roughly three possible explanations.

1. you recently signed up for my newsletter on Facebook or FlockWithoutBirds.com.

2. you signed up a long time ago, and this is the first post I have written in ages.

3. your inbox habits are hijacking your free will.

We’ll graciously gloss over the third option for now and pause at the second. My last post was in January. Since then, I’ve been busy preparing my novel for publication. It’s coming out on May 24th, and you can now pre-order it here. But what mainly stands in the way of my writing recently is the war in Ukraine. Being from Eastern Europe¹, I am devastated and without words over the suffering, destruction, and tragic reversal of human progress. Like many of you, I have been reading incessantly on the minutiae of war, military tactics, nuclear escalation, and the cultural history of Russia and Ukraine. I have a half-written blog post on the mythos of Eastern Europe prompted by the war, but I’m struggling to finish it.

So in the meantime, here’s an in-between post linking various strands from the past and the future.

First, here are potential headlines for 19 upcoming posts that are currently camping in my head. Ping me back with the top 3 you’d like to read first! You can reply to this email or mention me on Twitter (@fdousek). This list represents roughly the next five years of my blogging at my current pace. I’ll have to do something about that.

The Mythos of Eastern Europe

The Physics of Beliefs

Shapes of Life

Cultural Surgeries: How to Operate on Language

Bogdanov, Messerschmidt, Nelson: Tumultuous Afterlives of the Famous

Human Psyche as an Alien Lifeform

Consciousness as a Network Processor

The Belly-Centric Theory of the Universe

Forced Empathy, Unintended Evil, Paranoid Optimism

The Glasses Are Full: How to Unsee a Tree

Books I Loved and Might Love

Future of mRNA Therapy: Programmable Drugs

Rational or Irrational? Reframing Decision-Making

Brave New Science: Why AI Breaks Evidence-Based Medicine

Future Money: The Battle of Constants and Variables

Investing With Jeffrey Epstein

Threats to Humanity: The Next Five Years

Reading Ourselves Out of Consensual Reality

What We’re No Longer Free to Do: Assembly Theory in Culture

I want to ask you again: write to me with your top 3. How about we take this as an exploration of your free will? How many objections are standing in the way of you responding? There are the obvious ones. You probably haven’t written to me yet. We’re strangers. Choosing 3 out of 19 is a hard optimization problem². The titles sound like gibberish. Many other people may vote, so your voice doesn’t matter. Plus, you’re already spending too much time on this email when you ought to be working. I understand.

That’s why this is a perfect exercise in free will. You can now influence your future to a limited extent (voting on which blogposts to receive first). But will you? Do you actually have the freedom to respond?³

Speaking of free will, the last headline on the list is a nod to one of the best podcast episodes I’ve heard in a long time⁴: Lex Fridman interviewing Lee Cronin, a maverick chemist and the author of assembly theory. If you’re wondering what free will has to do with chemistry, it starts with survival kits. When Cronin was a teen, he decided to build a survival kit that would replicate his living standard in the case of a catastrophe. At first, he collected hundreds of valuable things, from matches to a flashlight and clothing. Eventually the kit got too large to be practical, so Cronin started exploring the minimal set of items. And he realized that some things are constructors—they create other items (a knife can be used to prepare firewood, for example). The key to building a minimal kit was to identify constructors that create other constructors ... and so on, up to the items that eventually do what we need. He ended up with a pocket-sized emergency kit and an inspiration for life.

Years later, he formulated assembly theory as an abstraction of the experience. It’s a way to measure the complexity of an object or a system. As a chemist, he first applied the theory to distinguish between simple molecules that can form spontaneously, and those that are so complex that they had to come about through an evolutionary process (as a lineage of increasingly complex constructors).

Lee then used assembly theory to redefine life (“life is a molecule that formed through evolution”) and even the search for aliens. While we now scan the cosmos for radio signals, we could be spectrographically scanning for complex molecules. And he applied the same idea to memory, free will, culture, and consciousness. Brilliant. Have a listen.

Have you exercised your free will yet?

A second podcast tip is my own appearance on LitHub with Andrew Keen. We covered a lot of ground, from Stories, to the paradoxes and divisions of our civilization, to the threats of AI, Silicon Valley’s attitude toward religion, and a discussion of truth, madness and why I started my own publishing company. 

And finally, an IRL invitation. If you are in Prague or Brno, check out Flock Without Birds as a theatre play by the avant-garde group 11:55. The Prague show is on May 2 and Brno on May 7.

It’s an hour packed full of the core ideas from the book—I could not make a better and funnier summary if I tried.

Happy Easter,

Filip

1. I used to say Central Europe, but it feels like all our hearts have been transplanted to Eastern Europe recently.

2. An example of what I’ll write about in Consciousness as a Network Processor.

3. If you want to sneak out of replying by saying that you are freely choosing not to respond, I counter that by saying “Haha—that’s not your free will, jsut the inertia of inaction!” Responding (despite inner objections) is the harder choice, thus the only choice that proves free will.

4. hat tip to @vicherek.