The Proof

The paper was published on a Tuesday, in the thirty-ninth year of my work on the problem, and it was — for exactly forty-three days — treated as a mathematical curiosity.

I had demonstrated, with what one reviewer described as "annoying rigor," that the apparent emergence of macroscopic indeterminacy from microscopic quantum uncertainty was an artifact of our measurement constraints, and that the underlying dynamics of the universe were, in fact, fully deterministic at all scales. Not deterministic in the coarse sense of "if you knew the position and momentum of every particle" — which was already Laplace's claim, and which had been troubled by quantum mechanics for a hundred and twenty years — but deterministic in the sense that the appearance of quantum indeterminacy was itself the predictable output of a higher-order structure, and that if one knew the structure, one could predict the output.

I had constructed the structure. I had published it. I had proved it.

My colleagues, during the forty-three days, argued with it.

On the forty-fourth day, a team at the Kavli Institute demonstrated, using a repurposed ion trap, that my formulation produced predictions about the ostensibly "random" decay events of Cesium-137 atoms that were correct to eleven decimal places. The predictions had been generated in advance, by my formula, using publicly available atomic data. The ion trap had been sealed. The decay events had been recorded. The predictions had matched.

On the forty-fifth day, the results were replicated in Shanghai. On the forty-sixth day, in São Paulo.

On the forty-seventh day, my phone began to ring in a way that I had, until then, only seen happen to other people's phones.

I will not rehearse the history of what followed. It is in the books now. Every serious philosophical journal has printed its response; every religious tradition has issued its adjusted position; every free-will court ruling of the twenty-first century is being reargued in the light of what is now called, perhaps unfortunately, the Elsten Proof. My name is attached to many things I would not, given the choice, have attached it to. The schools of thought that have arisen in response to my work include some that I find beautiful, some that I find horrifying, and many that I find, in their certainty about what my proof implies, to be mistaken in ways I have not yet found the energy to correct.

What I want to record, in this private document, is something simpler.

I want to record what it is like to live, day by day, as the person who proved it.

Immediately after the proof, for a period of several months, I found it difficult to do anything at all.

This was not because I believed I was no longer making choices. I was making choices. I was making tea in the morning, and choosing what to eat for lunch, and responding to the three thousand emails I had received from strangers who wished to inform me of their opinions about my work. The choices felt, as they had always felt, like choices. The experience of being a human being making decisions was entirely unchanged by my proof.

What was changed was what the choices meant.

Before the proof, when I chose tea over coffee, the choice was a small assertion of preference in a universe that was, at least in its philosophical descriptions, partially open to my agency. After the proof, the same choice was the inevitable output of a system that had, at the moment of the Big Bang, already contained the complete specification of this particular Tuesday morning, including the specific molecules of tea that would steep in the specific cup that would rest on the specific wooden table I had inherited from my grandmother, who had, at her own inherited wooden table, inevitably been about to inherit it from her grandmother, and so on, backward, along a chain of causes that had never actually branched.

The tea tasted the same.

That was the thing I had to learn to sit with. The tea tasted exactly the same.

I think, if I had expected the proof to produce nothing but horror, I might not have been able to continue living in the house that had been, as it turned out, predetermined to contain me. What produced horror, in the philosophers who came to interview me, was the idea that their choices had never been choices. What did not produce horror was the actual experience of making choices, which, as I had already observed, was unchanged by any theoretical framework.

This is what I learned, and what I now believe, and what I will write down here so that it cannot be taken from me in old age:

The experience of agency is real.

It is not a mistaken impression of something that is not happening. The mental state that occurs when a human being considers possibilities, weighs options, and selects one is a genuine mental state, produced by real brain processes, and those brain processes are doing something that, from the perspective of the person experiencing them, is exactly what we have always meant by "making a choice."

What my proof demonstrated was that the output of this process was, viewed from outside the system, the only possible output. But the experience of the process — the deliberating, the weighing, the feeling of it being open — that was, in the physics my proof described, fully present and fully real.

The choice was still happening.

It was just also, from another angle, already determined.

I have come to think of this as the difference between watching a river and calculating its path. The river, experienced from inside, is a torrent of specific eddies and surges, of temporary turns and small reversals, of an infinity of tiny contingencies that feel, to a fish in the river, entirely consequential. The path of the river, calculated from above, is a single line through the landscape, determined by the slope of the ground and the shape of the banks, without any indeterminacy whatsoever.

Both descriptions are correct.

The fish is not deluded for experiencing the turbulence. The calculation is not cruel for describing the path. They are looking at the same river, and they are answering different questions.

I have, in the eleven years since the proof, continued to work.

I have also continued to make the small, ordinary choices that constitute a life. I have married, and my partner is a sculptor who laughed, when I told her what I had proved, and said: Well. I already knew that, and I chose you anyway.

This remains, I think, the best summary I have heard of the philosophical situation my proof created.

I have had a daughter. She is four now. She likes, for reasons that I will not pretend to understand, the color of a particular paving stone outside our building, and she touches it, every morning, on our way to the small park where she insists on climbing a specific tree that has a particular rough bark she enjoys. These preferences — the stone, the tree, the bark — are, according to my proof, already specified in the initial conditions of the universe. I do not think this makes them less. I think, if anything, it makes them more.

The universe was, at its beginning, already going to produce the small specific weight of my daughter's hand on a specific paving stone on a specific morning in a specific city on a specific planet. That weight was, in some sense, what the universe was for.

It was not the only thing. There are many such weights, many such stones, many such hands. But each of them was in there from the start, and each of them mattered from the start, and the determinism of the path does not reduce the singularity of the moment.

I wrote the proof.

I will not, now, live as if the proof meant something it does not.

The tea tastes the same.