Hélio Steven’s Reviews > How Physics Makes Us Free > Status Update

Just had an amazing epiphany-like moment as Ismael makes an analogy between "physical law" and the property of "being a tragedy" as something that can only apply to a whole fictional story *after it's finished* - in both cases it's the unfolding itself that allows us to characterize how the constraints play out, not the other way around. Great food for thought.

Another quick personal comment: it's impressive the way Ismael makes explicit the same puzzlements I have about some hard-deterministic positions that privilege what she calls a globalist physical perspective as their main warhorse against free will. In his excellent FE, Dennett has also thrown very good punches against such position, but Ismael puts it in a way more similar to how I naturally tend to think about it.

Things are getting clearer indeed, as now Ismael discusses how the physics of the universe's thermodynamic gradient relates to choice. In my last comment I already had the feeling I could be being impatient, but wanted to take a little note just in case the apparent ambiguity didn't resolve (or did resolve in another direction).

... Maybe I'm missing something, but she seems to take absence of asymmetry in fundamental physics to be enough to reject objective information transfer of typical macro causal processes - hence the insistence on talk of "strategic routes to bring ends about" and rejection of "one event bringing about another". At other times she hints it's not quite what she thinks. Hopefully things gets clearer later on.

At this point the book is picking up great momentum. Armed with the conceptual tools she's introduced earlier, Ismael begins to put them to brilliant use; she's already starting to recognize and address every single issue a compatibilist has to work out, from the nature of the choosing self to responding to the simplistic readings philosophers make about "laws of nature" and determinism. Top notch stuff.

Excellent and much needed conceptual work on the difference-making distinction between self-organizing and self-governing systems and its importance. She suggests a much larger (and empirically incorrect) gap between self-governing human selves and other animals', though. But given the book's main concern, it's a passable mistake.