Walking the tramlines

Or a field guide to a deterministic universe

I woke up this morning to the sun beaming in through the window at 6:20 am with a cat sitting on top of me, my mind mulling over the idea of a deterministic universe.

I’d just finished watching the series "Devs” for the second time the previous night. Just a warning, if you’ve not seen it yet and plan to, there are gonna be some spoilers ahead.

The show explores the idea that our lives are entirely deterministic. As though we’re walking along tramlines and free will is nothing but an illusion. The future is set in stone just as securely as the past.

This idea got me thinking about the nature of free will and the universe that we practise it in. Wondering whether I’m walking along a set of preconstructed tramlines merely thinking that I’m acting with agency, or am I truly in charge of cause and effect?

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present before its eyes.

This is a little passage from the French scholar Pierre-Simon LaPlace, which he wrote at the end of the Enlightenment in 1814. He envisaged an omniscient intellect that could know all things past and future, an idea that became known as “LaPlace’s Demon” and was absolutely nothing new.

Philip K. Dick, the author behind Blade Runner and Minority Report (to name but a few) talked about how we’re living inside the illusion of the Devil and that it’s actually still 50 A.D. We’re just trapped in an endless circle of fabricated time.

Buddhism talks about how we exist inside Samsara, an endless cycle of birth, suffering, death, and rebirth, within the dream of the demon Mara.

The Sumerian Hermetics before that spoke of how we all exist inside the dream of the celestial being Sophia. In fact, if you know a bit of ancient Greek, you’ll recognise that name from the phrase hagia sophia, meaning “holy wisdom”. It also happens to be the name of a holy building that still exists today in Istanbul, built by the Byzantine Empire when Istanbul used to be their capital Constantinople.

In Devs, they create a perfect simulation of the Universe that they can fast forward (to a point) and rewind back to the formation of the Solar System. Inside that simulation, is the computer that they built to create the simulation in the first place running it’s own simulation, ad infinitum ad nauseum.

I was recently sitting in a teaching from a Tibetan Lama Rinpoche, and he was talking about karma and cause and effect. As he got towards the end of the talk, he got everyone to close their eyes and repeat “this is a dream”. Then, he asked us all to open our eyes and repeat “this is a dream”.

My mind was totally blown in the sort of way that it only can be in the presence of a powerful spiritual teacher. I remember sitting there, my mind devoid of thought as it attempted to decode what he’d just said. It was like I’d blue screened and someone had to come along and press my reset button.

Even an an indeterministic universe, where I am solely responsible for my choices, there are still countless variables at play that will impact the outcome of those decisions. I’ll come back to something I say a lot, and that’s “the only thing we truly have control over is ourselves”. Ultimately, I hope that that’s still true.

What all of this early morning philosophical meandering has taught me, at least, is not to take any of it too seriously.

Much Love
David

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