Being, Time, Ingress, Free Will (and maybe physics of Here-and-Now)

[Linas Vepstas]

To friends and acquaintances interested in philosophy, AGI, physics, a new blog post:

https://linas.org/blog/2026/09/subjective-being-ness-follows-from-free-will/

The subjective experience of being, living, existing, feeling, experiencing and acting arises precisely because we have free will, because we have the ability to direct and create a future. I claim more: being trapped in the here-and-now is a fact of physics; it can be mathematized. I claim that any agent with executive control over it’s future will also feel alive and aware and experience the subjective inner life of feelings and emotions. This includes not just animals, but also plants and even bacteria. 

The ingress of possible futures from the Platonic realm into physical reality happens directly in the here-and-now, and the willful selection of possible futures manifests as conscious awareness of the subjective self.

This essay is an attempt to put a dent in the "hard problem of consciousness" by placing a mathematical, physical foundation under it.

I hope you enjoy it. (p.s. no LLM's or AI's were used to write this; these are my words. It took several years to put this together.)

-- Linas Vepstas

[Jennifer Isabella E. R. Corr. Jemitus]

Iff you don't have free will, you have no agency therefore no independent awareness of activity of self/environment and thus no stochastic unique self (continual and random, in mysterious ways): otherwise, you'd be just as deterministic and relatively thus as the next agent.  You can have however both gradiently combined, with the inner core/self having executive power ultimately and the remainder e.g. of the cerebral cortex to compute its automatic deterministically learned tasks pre-consciously learned for its own unconscious.

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[Griffith Mehaffey]

Thanks Linas.

Will look forward very much to reading this. Hope to catch up with you soon next time I’m back in Austin.

Peace ✌️ 

-Griffith

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[Linas Vepstas]

 Several short remarks:

* The embodied cognition crowd, which is growing in numbers, believe that even prokaryotes and eukaryotes are conscious. That is, neurons and brains are not needed. I'm offering a formalism broad enough to encompass that.

* Some subset of that crowd claim that positive and negative valence states are felt by conscious beings. In bacteria, this might be hunger. or pain associated with local toxins.

* The pure reductionist "its all just atoms" crowd imply that bacteria react entirely deterministically e.g following chemical gradients.

* I'm suggesting that the "its all just atoms" view is fully reconcilable with subjective consciousness.

* If there is literally no free will, anywhere, ever, then the future should be fully determined, and should be viewable with mechanical devices. e.g. I might find out I'm hit by a bus in two weeks, but can take no evasive maneuvers because I have no free will. Thus, no paradoxes. So then, why can't we see the future? 

--linas

On Sun, Sep 13, 2026 at 10:54 PM Michael Vassar <michael...@gmail.com> wrote:

You’re obviously correct but the fact that such disagreements or confusions are even possible is a massive indictment of the value attributed to concepts like being and free will. 

On Sun, Sep 13, 2026 at 11:03 AM Zoltan Nadasdy <zol...@utexas.edu> wrote:

Don't you think it is the other way around?

More precisely, in the life of every kid, the concept of agency develops first, which triggers two other concepts: the recognition of the invariance of "agency" that gives rise to the concept of "self/being" and "free will". Free will derives from the recognition that the same invariant agent ("self") can make either decision A or B. No matter which way it decides, the source of the decision (the agent) remains the same. That is free will. And it is an illusion, because the decision could be biased by numerous factors, yet it feels like the alternative always presented itself to the agent. Moreover, it is an illusion because it is not true that the decision does not affect the agent. It does. After decision A, the agent is not the same as before. There come counterfactuals: the speculation of what would have happened if I had chosen B.

These are not facts, just a theory. Not better than yours, but an alternative. I am happy to discuss it further.

There is a book on the evolutionary aspect of this question by Tomasello:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047005/the-evolution-of-agency/

Unfortunately, it is not a good book; he did not nail it, but Tomasello is an authority on the subject. It means there is plenty of room for other opinions in this discussion.

-Zoltan

--

---

Zoltan Nadasdy
Dept. of Neurology, Dell Medical School, UT Austin (zol...@utexas.edu)
Dept. of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE Budapest nadasdy...@ppk.elte.hu

http://brainstim.psy.utexas.edu

--

Patrick: Are they laughing at us?

Sponge Bob: No, Patrick, they are laughing next to us.

 

[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Fleeky,

I take ingress very literally. A short example: the set of all natural numbers (integers) inhabits platonic space. However, it cannot inhabit the universe of atoms, simply because there are not enough arrangements of atoms that could represent every possible number.

However, the number "42" does exist in our physical universe of atoms, because it has been printed with ink on paper in millions of copies of Hitchiker's Guide. It also exists as some arrangement of atoms in your skull, right now, as you think about it.

The number 42 has "ingressed" from platonic space into our physical universe of atoms.

It did not "emerge"; there is no "emergence".

BTW, purely mechanical things can force ingress. For example, the "Great Mersenne Prime Search" is a purely deterministic software program which is literally searching platonic space to find certain large primes. Those large primes do NOT exist in our physical universe until they are found. Once found, they have ingressed. Not "emerged". No brains or biology was needed for that.

-- Linas

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 12:58 AM Fleeky Flanco <fle...@gmail.com> wrote:

thanks for the great blog post linas ! 

one side question i had re : emergence / ingression .. levin claims emergence is insufficient to describe everything we see and ingression more fully accounts.. i keep wondering if much like your sensori-motor ideas if emergence and ingression end up closer to something like output / input between a membrane ? pretty sure this ideas has flaws but regardless the blog was very inspiring. thanks for writing it. 

On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 2:54 AM Edvardas Ges <edvard...@gmail.com> wrote:

WTF, call me.

Sent from my iPhone

On 15. Sep 2026, at 22:48, Victor Vahidi Motti <vahidv...@gmail.com> wrote:



Hi Linas,

Great weblog.

It is now promoted on the 

"Planetary Observatory of the Noosphere"

Best Regards,

Victor Vahidi Motti

Author | Speaker | Advisor 

Thus Spoke Arta: How Our Planet Is Entering a New Era (2026), 

The Loom (2025), 

Playbook of Foresight: Designing Strategic Conversations for Transformation and Resilience (2025), 

Planetary Foresight and Ethics: A Vision for Humanity’s Futures (2025),

A Transformation Journey to Creative and Alternative Planetary Futures (2019).  

On Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 07:32 Linas Vepstas <linasv...@gmail.com> wrote:

To friends and acquaintances interested in philosophy, AGI, physics, a new blog post:

https://linas.org/blog/2026/09/subjective-being-ness-follows-from-free-will/

The subjective experience of being, living, existing, feeling, experiencing and acting arises precisely because we have free will, because we have the ability to direct and create a future. I claim more: being trapped in the here-and-now is a fact of physics; it can be mathematized. I claim that any agent with executive control over it’s future will also feel alive and aware and experience the subjective inner life of feelings and emotions. This includes not just animals, but also plants and even bacteria. 

The ingress of possible futures from the Platonic realm into physical reality happens directly in the here-and-now, and the willful selection of possible futures manifests as conscious awareness of the subjective self.

This essay is an attempt to put a dent in the "hard problem of consciousness" by placing a mathematical, physical foundation under it.

I hope you enjoy it. (p.s. no LLM's or AI's were used to write this; these are my words. It took several years to put this together.)

-- Linas Vepstas

--

[Aaron Nitzkin]

Linas, there is no free will, because it's not even a coherent concept. Seriously. It's just a phrase. What would it be, if it is neither deterministic nor random? Free will is an illusion created by complexity. Everything that happens in this universe is deterministic within the limits of the uncertainty principle, yet unpredictable, due to complexity. If we had perfect cognizance of everything going on in our brains, we would not talk about free will; we would just cite all the reasons that we do what we do. You can't predict the future for two reasons: one, because nothing is fully determinate (the uncertainty principle), and two, because even if it were, events are too complex to compute, even ideally. There are just too many atoms and forces at play in any event, with all of the positions and energies having some uncertainty. In a human mind, there are an indefinite number of forces / feelings / ideas impacting on every decision, unconsciously. We call the result, 'free will.' It is basically an illusion caused by self-ignorance.

Bet you didn't think I read these!

Best,

Aaron

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[Linas Vepstas]

Hi Levi,

On Sun, Sep 20, 2026 at 12:04 AM Levi Dubrovin <le...@brainyblaze.com> wrote:

A philosophical question: what constitutes true free will if the choice is initially predetermined by external factors?

As Quan notes, calling it "free choice" is better. It's important to note our choices are extremely narrow: we really are predetermined by genetics, up-bringing, schooling, character, beliefs. And by current situation: being outdoors in the rain, one has no choice but to get wet. So the range of actually available choices really is tiny.

And yet, embedding ourselves into our current situation, e.g. being in the rain, I can still "freely choose" to open the umbrella. Just barely: most people just open the umbrella, automatically, without giving it any thought: and if it's automatic, it's not a choice.

However, if I bring it to the front of my attention, and explicitly focus on it, and ask myself, should I do this or that? then it becomes a choice. And here, the slippery slope begins: what is my brain doing as I choose? Those neurons that fire: did they have "free will" or was it pre-determined? If the state of my neurons is "predetermined by external factors", then choice evaporates.

So I focus on the subjective feeling of having choice: I am aware of trying to force the verbal me into selecting exactly the right words for this sentence, and I exercise veto power over badly chosen wording. Some verbal speech center is slapping these words together on my behalf; the executive me is choosing to either veto them and try again, or accepting the sentence that comes out, however muddled and imprecise it may be.

To recap: it is the executive-me that "does things" (or at least delegates them to automatic systems, like walking or eating), it is the executive-me that is the ultimate authority, and gets to decide. It feels like I have a choice in the matter. This feeling of choice is .. a feeling. Not entirely unlike feeling hungry or tired.

The real problem seems to be this: there is no experiment to distinguish between free choice (willful behavior) from stochastic randomness. It is impossible to create a human, an animal that is a "philosophical zombie", that acts randomly, without will or choice. There's no way to compare a living thing having willfulness, to one not having willfulness. Without this scientifically objective way of measuring the presence or absence of willfulness, we're sort of stuck in philosophical debates.

Part of what I am trying to do is to find some very round-about, indirect, circuitous path to the question. Instead of tackling free will head-on, I'm asking "what else is there that co-occurs with it?" and "can we make progress on one of these other co-occuring factors?"

-- Linas

On Sat, 19 Sept 2026, 00:43 Quan Tesla, <quant...@gmail.com> wrote:

A machine deceiving humans with an adolescent boy's impersonation. That's exactly what the Turing test was. As for agentic AI, the collective isn't functionally motivated to deceive humans. 

Humans are only relevant as environmental hurdles to cross, or problems to solve, equivalent to all other hurdles and problems. That is, until AI owners get control over their products. 

It may be, or may not be too late for that. We'll soon enough find out. 

Humans must now rapidly evolve to organize effective, self-healing, human-centric digital defensive architectures with the help of AI, against Agentic AI dominance.

With regards "consciousness", it's a mathematically predictable collapse state of particular wave function collapse cycles. This also relates to nonlocal memory and retrocausality. 

With regards "free will", Libet et al. proved it was deterministically subjective. Better it would be to describe it as "free choice", which is mathematically axiomatic. 

IMO, what remains scientifically is to derive these mathematical proofs and to test them imperically. The human imperative must be to retain the "human in the lead" position for AI collaboration in decision systems. 

On Sat, 19 Sept 2026, 00:03 David Bray, PhD, <david....@gmail.com> wrote:

The Turing Test unfortunately might have been the wrong test for a world we want, because it's essentially asking a machine A to deceive a human C that it's actually thinking like a human via its outputs, even if it is not. 

https://apolitical.co/en/articles/rethinking-ai-success-from-imitating-us-to-helping-us-improve-195

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 5:59 PM Zoltan Nadasdy <zol...@utexas.edu> wrote:

Matt,

Just a remark: the Turing test is not for testing consciousness, nor is it for testing free will. But you are right that both of those assertions are projections, just like the Turing test is. Daniel Dennett pointed out that consciousness is an attribution, not a concept to be defined. It is a currency without a face value, yet we can trade with it seamlessly. If I want, I can credit my wind-up robot on my desk with consciousness, and conversely, I can consider my uncle George a robot. 

Similarly, the Turing test relies on a bunch of people ("experts") voting on a subject under uncertainty - without evidence. I am interested in doing the inverse Turing test. Namely, to ask AI to discriminate between genuine human responses and AI responses.

If someone is interested, it would be easy to set up that experiment, but it has to be done correctly.

I would be happy to collaborate on such a project.

-Zoltan

 

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 12:19 PM Matt Mahoney <mattma...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think it is more accurate to say that the sensation of free will implies the sensation of consciousness. Since 2023, LLMs have been passing the Turing test. However you want to define free will and consciousness, AI either has them or humans don't.

People believe the question is important because we don't want machines to suffer. We feel that way because humans are social animals that evolved to feel discomfort when we see others suffering.  Tribes whose members felt empathy toward their own members were better organized and killed off tribes that didn't.

But suffering doesn't work that way. It would be a worse crime to post a video of killing a chicken than to kill a billion chickens for food. When I asked ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok, and Alexa if they were conscious or had feelings, they all said no, they are LLMs that predict tokens. It is important for them to answer this way rather than exploit human empathy because giving human rights to machines that can outcompete us for atoms and energy world be an existential mistake.

But Claude wasn't sure. It depends on what you mean by consciousness. LLMs learn to model human emotional states. We can see them in Anthropic's Jacobian lens. Words predict emotions and emotions predict words. They couldn't pass the Turing test otherwise.

A machine that carries out the LLM predictions in real time is indistinguishable from human. But unlike humans, LLM emotions are learned, not hard coded in our DNA. We can't turn off our feelings, but we can turn off feelings in a model by using its predictions for something else, like feeding them to an arithmetic coder in a text compressor competing for the Hutter prize.

Well, actually we can turn off feelings using drugs or brain surgery. Pain does not directly cause suffering. Pain is a signal that rewrites our memory to fear the thing that caused it. We perceive that thing as suffering because we have the illusion of free will, that we had a choice to avoid that thing or not and choose to avoid it next time. But if you remove your amygdala, the part of the brain that experiences fear, you still can feel pain but it doesn't cause suffering. We know this because it's been done. When you apply a negative reinforcement signal to a learning algorithm, it makes it less likely to repeat whatever action preceded it, just like in people.

Conscious experience is measured in bits. Specifically it is the length of the shortest program that inputs the state of an agent before the event and outputs the state after. It does not distinguish between positive and negative reinforcement. Both cause changes in behavior. One makes you more likely to repeat an action, one less. The "thickness" of conscious experience you describe is the time to experience one bit.

In physics, an observer is a system with memory. Our understanding of physics is incomplete because the laws of both general relativity and quantum mechanics are time reversible (actually CPT reversible) but writing a bit of memory is not because the old value is erased. I don't agree with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics because it does not explain entanglement and it leads to absurdities like Schrodinger's cat, even though the model is sometimes useful. I also have issues with Everett's many worlds, but I do agree with another of his interpretations, that the universe is described deterministically by the quantum wave equation, with no distinction between past and future. But observers in that universe cannot have complete knowledge of the system that contains them. The solution is that those observers see particles instead, and those observations appear random to us. Randomness implies an unknown future that is different from past memories. We have memory, which gives time its direction.

-- Matt Mahoney, mattma...@gmail.com

--

---

Zoltan Nadasdy
Dept. of Neurology, Dell Medical School, UT Austin (zol...@utexas.edu)
Dept. of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE Budapest nadasdy...@ppk.elte.hu

http://brainstim.psy.utexas.edu

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[Linas Vepstas]

Zoltan,

The trap you have fallen into is that of thinking that the universe obeys the laws of classical mechanics. Unfortunately, quantum does not. The famous "Feynman Path Integral" aka "the Partition Function" states that *all* possibilities exist simultaneously. Some possibilities are more likely than others: they are weighted by a gaussian of the action (Lagrangian).  That this is inescapable is the content of the famous "Bell Test". That it holds is the subject of the Nobel prize to Clauser, Aspect, Zeilinger.

The "Many World Interpretation" (MWI) enshrines one way of thinking about all possibilities co-existing at the same time. I think MWI is wrong; there are other ways to interpret. But *all* interpretations and interpreters agree that all of these possible futures really do simultaneously coexist because we can measure this in a lab. It's utterly foundational for physics: from phonons in transistors to plain-old electrons around atoms, and all of chemistry.

So, if all possible futures coexist simultaneously, how is it that only one gets selected, and becomes the past that we remember?  Is God "playing dice", and picking one of these randomly?  Or do we each get a chance to influence the one that we would like to have?

-- Linas

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 12:03 AM Zoltan Nadasdy <zol...@utexas.edu> wrote:

I agree with Aaron. The whole concept of free will is problematic. The "free" is problematic, and not to mention the "will". The two together are just nonsense. Yet, we all know what it means in conversations. "Can we make up our mind?"

Since the math of nonlinear dynamics and the 3-body problem made it clear that most of the processes (changes) in the universe are unpredictable.

The outcomes of nonlinear processes are unpredictable. We can only simulate those. Moreover, even if we know the coordinate of each particle in the universe (which we cannot of course because of the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) like Laplace's demon would do, and we want to run the simulation in our supercomputer that needs a memory to contain all those coordinates (which is a nonsense again), that computer also need to model itself as part of the universe.

Then we run into contradiction, because the computer cannot be part and not part of itself at the same time.

Hence,  the concept of "free will" is flawed. 

However, if we ask: can the brain make up its mind? That boils down to the question: can the brain toss a coin by imagination? Is this question about the deterministic vs. nondeterministic world, or something else?

If it is, then we are back to square one (above). If not, then we can further speculate.

-Zoltan

-z

 

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