The Magus and my own Signs and Symbols: Free Will and the Universe

I might be going crazy, but here is my Signs and Symbols style degenerative thought process on the universe.

I am really good at over simplifying complex things, and I am even better at over complicating simple things, so when I was thinking about the role of free will in The Magus I started out with the simple question "Does Nicholas have free will, or is everything predestined by Conchis?" this quickly turned into "Does anyone have free will?" which led to "What is free will?"... What is free will? Is it anything we can decide that is not predestined for us? If that is the case, then what is predestined for us must have a definition other than its binary relationship to free will, just as dark is the absence of light, but light is visible radiation, not just the opposite of darkness. Destiny, then, to me, is the lowest state of energy, the path of least resistance, to use a more familiar term, not just the absence of free will.

Imagine you are a river, you are flowing through a canyon, and you come to a fork in the river, there is a pathway that leads down a gradient of -.05 degrees, and a path that leads up the same gradient. Which do you choose? Well, you're water, so you don't choose, you just go down (assuming that there is not enough flow pressure to drive you both up and down). Now imagine you're electricity, and you're flowing through a wire, and you come to a split where you can either go straight, or follow the divergence to the left. Again, you would go straight, following the path of least resistance. Now finally you can be a human, the only instance so far in which you can actually choose to do one thing or the other, and not just follow the path requiring the least energy. Obviously water and electrons are not animate in the sense that we normally think of the word. I am not interested in the question of whether things have souls or not. That means nothing in this thought experiment.

I believe in this model of free will for several reasons, one is because it ignores the human component. Is it not my dog's free will to either steal my food or eat his shitty food? Free will indeed, because he knows my food tastes better, regardless of whether it is or isn't as good for him, and will or won't provide him with as much energy. Dog's are exercising free will by ignoring energy states, and so humans can stop thinking of themselves as special for having free will. If we reduce free will from macro-organisms to single cells, we see that cells also resist states of lowest energy, because they are organized groups of organelles, and this organizational construct takes energy to create. The state of lowest energy is, paradoxically, pure energy. How is that? Because pure matter (which is true lowest energy) cannot really exist, because gravity creates energy (in a way), which seems impossible. But think about it, you expend energy by jumping, heat is lost to the system. but gravity creates energy, or rather, gravity is able to remove your energy from the system, by pulling you back to earth, which creates motion and impact and friction in the air, and all of these forces that are energy.

Conservation of energy and conservation of matter are actually the concept of conservation of existence in space-time, according to the ever popular e=mc2 (squared, not x2), but this is hard to fathom when one takes everything into account. How can energy, in a system where nothing but energy and empty space exist, cool down and convert to matter, as proposed by Big Bang theorists? Well first one has to know what energy is, without defining it in terms of matter. It can't be radiation, because radiation is still particles, it can't be movement, because movement requires things to move. So what is e in e=mc2 before the creation of matter? And if we can't answer that, then who is to say that energy isn't being created by gravity causing impact energy and friction? But this seems a bit off track from the subject of free will doesn't it? It gets worse, more convoluted, more referrentially manic.

The way I see it (which any physics teacher at this university should be able to prove wrong), since we are constantly apparently adding time as a dimension, we should also constantly be apparently adding space, as these are relative dimensions inextricably related, and we are (so goes my theory), which (I believe) is part of why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. If acceleration is distance over time squared, then it tracks that, by adding distance and time to the universe proportionally, we should get an accelerating expansion of the universe, but does this seem correct? Shouldn't the ratio of space and distance being added not account for this? Perhaps not, but that is where spin comes in. I believe that, in order to get the proper ratio of distance to time with respect to the acceleration of our universe, there has to be another factor, which would be the imperceptible spin of our universe forcing things outward even faster through centrifugal force. This, when added to the idea of constantly creating more space in the universe, would provide what I believe to be an accelerating rate of outward expansion. Imagine you are doing spin art, and you drop your paints. eventually the drops slow down and fall to the ground, but if you kept expanding the space that they are in, they can't ever come to that state of rest, unless they somehow disengage from the system (not possible in the universe) and find a straight moving tangent line. This is all ad-hoc, because if it weren't somebody would have thought of it already, so it can be wrong, but that doesn't affect the fact that this is an explanation of free will, not a discussion of strict physics, thought the free will seems to be getting lost. That's going to continue for just a little longer.

Back to gravity, just like no one can really say what energy is without its relationship to matter, we can't really say what gravity is without its relationship to matter, or space-time. Gravity is the force that attracts bodies of matter to something big, right? but it does that by creating intrinsic curves in space time (we see this because everything big in the universe tends to take on the shape of a sphere, because it has the smallest surface area for a given volume, which is to say that it is the densest shape, and therefore gives itself the most gravity, the most ability to pull objects into its apparent influence in space-time). A sphere is intrinsically curved. Your bed sheets are intrinsically flat. Imagine wrapping your bed sheets around a globe. See what happens? Your bed sheets must either fold, or create irregularities, because they are intrinsically flat, not curved. Now lay that globe flat. See what happens now? You have to totally destroy the globe to flatten it, because it is intrinsically curved. The same is true with space time, you would have to put incredible amounts of energy into the system to flatten it, because gravity is curving it, by taking dimension and condensing it in a way unfathomable to the human mind. It is essentially removing dimension from space time, so it has every right to create a proportional removal of energy constantly (since the space is removes is also a constant) within the sphere of influence of the removed space time. If dimension has been removed, energy must be removed from the system proportionally according to the formula I decided to work on the other day F= e/d. This formula has been ignored because, as has been stated, we can't actually remove the connects of force (F) or energy (e) from matter (m), but through the basic laws of arithmetic, one can get this formula pretty easily by isolating m from the formulas F=ma and e=mv2. (Here v is substituted for c because all energy is essentially kinetic, even energy of enthalpy. Heat is just particles moving really really fast). Try to stay with me for just a bit longer.

If F=e/d then the amount of distance removed by gravity (F because it is a force) needs to see a proportional decrees (removal) in enegry from the system because e=Fd by the same logic, so negative distance, and positive force must mean negative energy. Basic, no?


So gravity is not removing matter, because that is too simple. It is dimension itself that has been removed. But one cannot create more gravity, in the strictest sense, because gravity is a property of matter, which is all already here. we can't create more matter, we can only create more energy through nuclear fusion or fission. Fission is the atomic bomb, which destroys bonds to release tremendous energy: energy proportional to the mass times the speed of light squared. So what is the energy destroying Hiroshima? Heat, but more than heat, because heat is just energy transfer through radiation, and radiation (at least the cancer causing kind) is just gamma particles that vibrate enough to disrupt your cells, or destroy them completely. Fusion is what the sun is doing when it takes Hydrogen (atomic mass of two: one proton and one neutron) and turns it into Helium (atomic mass of 3.96: two protons, two neutrons, and some energy released as sunlight, and if the calculations of Einstein are correct (which they are) then .04 units of atomic mass (which is a very small number comparatively, becomes very large when multiplied by the speed of light squared. The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s that squared is big enough to make me not want to try to calculate it right now.

The point of saying this is, we can create energy in insane quantities, we know we can, but we can't create matter from energy, because we don't even understand energy in any sense that doesn't use matter as a reference. So we cannot reverse the effects of entropy, which moves things from states of organization into states of chaos. It is what renders energy ineffectual by making it unavailable to do work. Imagine trying to use a peso in England, the unit is too small, so it can't do any work for you. In other words, our universe devours matter using black holes and e=mc2 conversions, and then renders the created energy useless eventually through entropy, which is essentially saying, to me, that it is dissociating energy from its relationship to matter, the original state of our Big Bang existence, before energy decided, of its own free will apparently, to slow down, and create matter, which, because gravity was created simultaneously, coalesced to form more gravity fields, which take space-time and make it intrinsically curved, and this curvature manipulates energy and everything else.

Gravity is a relatively weak force in the universe. There are things to account for such as dark matter and dark energy. I don't want to account for those right now. (actually, the accelerating of the universe is the primary function of supposed "dark energy" which I have already explained, and my explanation is much more satisfactory than the conventional "we don't know what the fuck is happening, so we'll say that something un-observable called dark energy is fucking with everything.") I know very little about dark matter, but I know all of the same things anyone else knows, I just haven't tried to work that into the system yet. The important parts are these: F=e/d   and that means that energy and force can be related without matter through the empty space distance of the vacuum. Gravity "pinches" space time (converges the vectors in an apparently accelerated frame of reference) so effectively, that it is actually technically removing some of the universe's distance from usable existence, just like entropy is removing the energy from usable existence. The movement of objects in space means that gravity is related not to the space, but to the object occupying it, leaving it still inextricably related to matter, and keeping all pieces of e=mc2 constant as they need to be. This removal of available distance sees a proportional (and proportionally relievable) decrease in energy, which is what keeps people stuck to the ground, negative energy interacting with the third law of motion (the ground pushing up on you with equal and opposite force according to Newton) to keep us where we are. The apparent acceleration of the universe is do to the human inability to view space-time as a finite unit, and is therefore a product of the apparent addition of space proportional to the apparent addition of time, and exagerated by the necessary, but imperceptible spin that our universe has inherited. So what?

Here is the end: the universe in complete entropy. The black holes have devoured everything, even each other, leaving only radiation. Except the radiation has nowhere left to go, because the black hole, containing all matter in the universe, and therefore all related force, and all related energy, has condensed the entirety of existence into itself (minus that damned dark matter, what is that shit?) and now it has even pulled in the radiation it had previously spewed out, only because the radiation has no other space to occupy, and here we go...the universe is gone...AND THEN IT ALL EXPLODES BACK INTO BEING!!!! because the energy that was previously unavailable has been condensed, subject to gravity, and repackaged into usable energy, with a reversed spin, taking the universe from 0% available energy to 100% and everything keeps on ticking.

Where is the free will? Nothing in the universe can resist these apocalyptic forces. But, the universe is teaching a lesson here: influence what you can, exercise your free will, because the day will come when entropy will overcome everything, and you will have no more will, and in that exact same moment, when all of time is condensed with all of space, everything will overcome entropy, and free will shall make its comeback, even stronger than the tragically canceled Michael Jackson comeback tour would have been, and existence will start anew. If eleutheria is the ability to do all and the restraint not to, then we are special as living organism to have that restraint, because the fundamental forces and the black holes do not have what we have. Conchis was a black hole tearing through Nicholas's life. Alison was entropy. Julie was gravity. The Magus doesn't really matter in the end, but neither does anything else, so I'm glad I get to blog about my favorite book and make light while I'm here. There is no better feeling than being unobserved, removed from influence, and totally free.