Entangled Narratives

Mira: I’m still not convinced that free will survives once you take modern physics seriously. If every particle’s behavior is described by probabilistic laws, aren’t we just glorified random-number generators? Leo: That caricature misses the point. Quantum indeterminacy doesn’t mean sheer randomness in the colloquial sense; it’s structured unpredictability. Besides, the equations don’t tell us which interpretation is true. Many-Worlds, Bohmian mechanics, objective collapse—they’re empirically indistinguishable, at least for now. Ana: It’s ironic. In literary criticism, if three interpretations can’t be decisively ranked, we treat that plurality as enriching, not as a crisis. You physicists sound almost offended by underdetermination. Leo: Offended is strong, but it’s intellectually unsettling. We’re used to theories converging on one coherent picture of reality. Here we have mathematically rigorous frameworks that all work and yet tell rather incompatible stories about what *is*. Mira: Philosophers would call that a metaphysical embarrassment of riches. But look closer: in each interpretation, the notion of agency shifts. In Many-Worlds, every possible decision branches, so talk of "I could have done otherwise" becomes trivial—there’s always a branch where I did. In Bohmian mechanics, the hidden variables fix the trajectory, rendering freedom illusory. Ana: You’re smuggling in a very narrow, almost legalistic sense of freedom. In novels, characters are interestingly free when their choices *reverberate*—when the narrative structure allows their decisions to reshape the moral landscape, even if we, the readers, suspect the author has predetermined everything. Leo: So you’re suggesting we think of ourselves as characters inside a cosmic novel, whose author might be the wave function or the Hamiltonian? Ana: Not exactly an author, more like a narrative constraint. The beauty of, say, Woolf or García Márquez is that form and content are entangled. Consciousness isn’t merely described; it’s enacted through the prose. Perhaps our sense of agency emerges in a similar way: it’s not an add-on to the laws but a pattern that appears when you zoom out from electrons to experiences. Mira: That would make freedom contingent on perspective, not on microphysical loopholes. Ethically, that might be enough. We hold people responsible not because their choices float outside causality, but because their deliberations reliably track reasons. Leo: Yet the unease remains. If, at the most fundamental level, everything that happens either had to happen or happens somewhere, what room is left for genuine regret? Ana: In literature, regret isn’t about rewriting the plot; it’s about reinterpreting it. A character’s late realization can retroactively illuminate earlier scenes. Perhaps our moral lives, too, are less about altering the universe and more about altering the meaning we ascribe to what has already unfolded. Mira: That sounds dangerously like consolation. But maybe consolation, when lucid rather than sentimental, is precisely what a mature worldview ought to offer.