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
Gצdel 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
