“Yeah, I’ve heard of them.”
“Great. But did you know that they’re all wrong?”
“How so?”
“Because they all make a fatal error. They assume that there is such a thing as free will. Now, classical physics shows us that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, meaning that there is no place for free will in the universe since everything in it is just mechanically reacting with other things. However, they say that since quantum mechanics involves probabilities it therefore allows for free will. Not so, says superdeterminism. While most interpretations of quantum mechanics allow for probabilities in the universe, superdeterminism takes the fact—and it is a fact—that there is no free will as its default.
“For some reason, even extremely smart scientists go for the free will illusion, probably because they really like the idea that we have freedom of choice and that we aren’t merely puppets being led on. Or perhaps simply because they have no choice not do.”
I took a sip from my drink. She didn’t seem terribly interested in what I had to say, but she was still listening.
“Anyway,” I continued, “to cut a long story short, superdeterminism says that since there hasn’t been any freedom of choice since the beginning of the universe, then every measurement ever made in science was predetermined by the terms established during the Big Bang. And as you probably know, most quantum mechanics interpretations stem from the double-slit experiment, which assumes that the result of the experiment depends on whether it is measured or not. But if there is no free will, then the ‘choice’ of measuring it was predetermined and therefore the results were also predetermined, meaning that there is no ‘measurement problem’ in quantum mechanics and therefore no probabilities.”
“Uh-huh,” was all she had to say.
“So why did the universe, being deterministic, create the illusion of free will? For the same reason it creates all illusions. Because it is predetermined to do so. Why is it predetermined to do so? Because it arose from random quantum fluctuations, as did a trillion other universes, most of which never had any life or sentience, not to mention planets or even molecules. Through a random fluke, ours did. Well, it had to, right? Otherwise we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“Is that so?” she said. I sensed her sarcasm.
I downed my drink. “Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. This is just my opinion, nothing more.”
“You’re right. That is what I’m thinking.”
“But it’s not. Not really. It’s much more than that. Free will, if you really think about it, is not a possible concept since everything can ultimately only either be predetermined or random and in either case there can be no free will. Of course, everything is random but also deterministic at the same time. How? Because the Big Bang, which set the course of the universe, was an utterly random event by any considerable standard. And yet, everything after it has been a hundred percent deterministic without a single fucking atom being anywhere it was not destined to be.”
She clearly wasn’t listening at this point and I was beginning to feel aggravated.
I continued: “This means that me talking to you and telling you all these things was destined from the very beginning of the universe. As was pedophilia, rape, and cancer. In fact, if you consider every misery ever conceived of on this little globe of ours, then God, if you wanted to call the universe that, is a malevolent scumbag, a cosmic torturer, and the king of psychopaths. But since God has no free will either, then it would be more fitting to say that God is dead and we are merely the maggots devouring on his rotting corpse, which, like the universe, eventually will be no more. And thank God for that!”
She looked nonplussed. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think I’m gonna leave.”
She got up from her seat and walked away, leaving her drink unfinished.
“Where are you going?” I asked after her, louder than I had intended to. Here I was, revealing to her the secret truth of the universe, only to be treated like a leper for doing so.
“Calm down,” the bartender told me.
“Or what?”
“Or you’ll have to leave.”
“Oh what a tragedy that would be,” I said sarcastically. “Get me a whiskey.”
A disgusted expression on her face, the bartender poured me one. I downed it. After she had poured five more, each one adding fuel to my wrath, I was beginning to feel like a philosophical Tony Montana. Eventually, drunk as fuck, I stood up from my seat. The room was spinning around me.
“You know what?” I said loudly to no one in particular, gesturing aggressively with my hands. “None of you people know fuckin’ anything. About life. About the world. About the secret truths of the universe. You don’t know shit. You live your whole lives in delirium and you die as ignorant as you live. And when someone is trying to tell you something real for a change, someone who has put their very sanity on the line in order to learn of these things, you spit in their fuckin’ face. Why? Because it threatens the nice little delusional fantasy world that you’ve constructed for yourselves, where everything is good and easy and meaningful and in it you are all-powerful. But there’s just one little problem with your fuckin’ fantasy, folks. IT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT!”
After I had finished saying the last sentence, a guy, presumably one of the bartenders, got his hands on me and began escorting me out of the bar in a stranglehold while the people in the bar watched on in silence.
“Get your fucking hands off me,” I said, but the guy persisted. He kicked the door of the bar open and began forcing me towards the stairs that led down to the exit.
When we came to the steps, I tripped and lost my balance. As I did, the bartender let go of his grip on me and I tumbled down the stairs.
And then there was only darkness.
29
I was stuck in an immense spiderweb that lay suspended in nothingness. I looked up. Above me hung a gigantic black spider. It began pulling me towards her.
I opened my eyes. Sunlight was filtering in through the window blinds to my right. The walls of the room I was in were white and the floor was covered with linoleum. There was an antiseptic smell in the air. I realized I was in a hospital bed. It was the last place I wanted to be.
I had seen the insides of hospitals plenty of times in my life already. I’d had my appendix, tonsils, and adenoids removed, and I had once broken my right arm. All of these had resulted in weeks of staying in hospitals, letting me observe their clinical ugliness in detail. The old, nearly dead people walking the halls in slow motion. The morbidly obese fat bastards barely fitting in the hospital beds. A multitude of patients with ailments both physical and imaginary. The doctors like priests. The nurses like nuns. The patients like the feeble-minded churchgoers seeking salvation for the sickness inside their souls—a sickness that only death could cure. If a human body was so fragile that it constantly needed medical care, it could not be worth very much.
I sighed. Right. But what had landed me here? I felt my head. There was a large bump on it that hurt like a son of a bitch. Let’s see. I was leaving Scarlet Emperor, drunk as fuck and against my will, and I must have tripped when I came to the stairs. Which was not surprising, seeing as somebody had held me in a stranglehold at the time. I guess they had called an ambulance for me.
I looked around the room. Aside from me, there was an old man in another bed, silently reading a newspaper. My clothes were on a chair nearby. A nurse must have undressed me.