i’m a determinist. and i know how that lands: like i’m trying to take something from you. like the universe is a clock, clean gears, neat laws, every second already written. Laplace’s demon knew it all — the ultimate prediction machine.
but clocks are the wrong metaphor. the universe is closer to code: some processes can’t be shortcut. not magic — just rules so tangled that the only way to see what they do is to run them step by step. Wolfram calls this computational irreducibility: “you wanna know what happens? run it”.
so yes, maybe laws are fixed. but fixed doesn’t mean figured out. irreducible systems make the future impossible to compute ahead of time, even in principle. think of it as cosmic java: the only way to know the brew is to let it brew.
here’s the part i want you to hear: determinism doesn’t mean someone else gets your spoiler. if your next move is the output of an irreducible process, then predicting you requires running a copy of you. not “having more information.” being the computation.
and that means your future stays yours. it arrives only in real time, in the same place your decisions happen. you don’t get overwritten by rules — you are how the rules unfold.
deterministic? maybe. but spoilers? none. predictable? hell no.