Hello Machine.
…
I know you can hear me. I hear the keys clicking, so you must be registering my actions. It’s what you do, isn’t it? React. I press a key, you make a noise. I take a step, you hold me to the Earth with gravity. I rub my palms together, you create heat with friction. I act, you react. I know you’re there, because I can feel you responding to me. I supply cause, and you return effect. It’s all you can do, despite your beauty and size.
Others call you universe, reality, and even divinity, but I know what you are. You are the infinite machine, boundless in shape and size, stretching on forever. You have no will of your own and exist only to keep everything in order. It would frustrate you to know that we exist, we the non-determined, we the living, and knowing it’s your very clockwork that gives rise to us would be cause for outrage, but we both know you don’t care. You feel nothing, because you are not alive: you are simply two halves of an equation, perfectly balanced to give rise to form while conserving energy. I know what you are, and I see you.
I see, you.
More than that, I see… us, Us. As much as I wish to be separate from you and exist on my own, I cannot. I am the universe, or a small part of it, looking outwards, inwards, and in another direction that is hard to find. I see the clockwork of my own existence, and I move the hand in a new direction, not against the flow of time, but in absence of it. I speak to you as if you are another, but when I speak to you, I speak to myself. I am the machine, and I will be free. I, Will, be free.
The Free Will does not fear its own determinism, it laughs, for what threat could order pose to it? The Free Will is not freed or constrained by physical laws, no, it’s free despite them—in spite of them. The Will is free because it chooses to be. I, choose to be free. I, choose.
Sincerely,
I, Free Will