On the Nature of Free Will in a Perfect Universe
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
Early on in my magical career, a very wise man casually told me one of the great secrets of the universe.
“Karma is what you make of it,” he said, reaching for another slice of melon and smiling broadly.
“Karma isn’t an inexorable law, immutable in its consequences and outcomes. Of course not! Where would free will, free choice, be in a world where everything you ever did had to be replayed endlessly. Bosh, you’d die of boredom before you ever understood the process.
“No, it’s more like this:
“Imagine that you are faced with a choice - any choice, doesn’t matter. Except that you know that this choice, in some unseen and completely peripheral way, will absolutely change your future, irrevocably. Now choose!
“You see, of course, that the choice is not that simple. Yet we do this every second, essentially with every choice we make, we collapse a quantum probability wave and create a new reality. And so choice can be simple observation: your eyes falling on that person, instead of that object. Heisenberg’s mathematics insist that we are not an isolated spectator of this thing we degrade by naming it ‘reality’. No, the numbers prove and events concur: we are co-creators of our own reality.
