Pip: Welcome to The Blind Sheep — where the questions are big enough to make your coffee go cold. But we’ll keep this to the point. I’m Pip!
Mara: And I’m Mara! Today’s pod is about exactly that kind of question — whether the universe left any room for choice, or whether the answer was locked in before anyone thought to ask. Let’s start with the physics of free will, or the possible absence of it.
Atoms are Predetermined
Pip: The question on the table is whether your decision to listen to this post was made for you at the moment of the Big Bang — and whether that’s actually a serious scientific position or just a very confident excuse.
Mara: It’s serious. The post sets up the stakes with a direct challenge: “did you choose this, or was that decision made 13.8 billion years ago at the exact moment of the big bang?”
Pip: And the unsettling part is that the post isn’t asking rhetorically. There are physicists with Nobel prizes who would answer: no, you didn’t choose.
Mara: That’s where superdeterminism comes in. Bell’s theorem, confirmed by experiments that won the 2022 Nobel Prize, rules out local hidden variables — meaning quantum mechanics really does look nonlocal and strange. But Bell himself admitted one loophole he couldn’t close: if experimenters can’t actually choose their detector settings freely, the whole proof rests on a shaky assumption.
Pip: So the escape hatch from spooky action at a distance is — the universe was already choreographing your escape from the beginning.
Mara: Gerard ‘t Hooft, the 1999 Nobel laureate, has spent years on exactly this. His cellular automaton interpretation treats quantum randomness as what determinism looks like from the inside — complex enough to appear random without anything actually being random.
Pip: Sabine Hossenfelder goes further, arguing superdeterminism might do what a century of physics hasn’t: reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. The critics call it unfalsifiable, and that’s a fair charge — the post doesn’t dodge it.
Mara: Right, the post is careful there. It calls superdeterminism “genuinely controversial within physics itself,” not settled science — a live argument in actual journals.
Pip: Then Conway and Kochen walk in with the Free Will Theorem and argue the opposite from the same data.
Mara: Their proof runs like this: if experimenters have even a sliver of genuine free will — choices not fully determined by the past — then individual particles must have that same kind of freedom. Not consciousness, just genuine indeterminacy. Two serious frameworks, same experiments, opposite conclusions, neither disproven.
Pip: The biggest questions rarely make headlines. They sit in journals while everyone scrolls past — which is, as the post notes, kind of the whole thesis.
Mara: And that tension — predetermined universe versus particle-level freedom — is really a question about what we can know and what we can test, which connects directly to how we build knowledge at all.
Pip: Whether or not you chose to listen to this, here we are.
Mara: The question of what’s actually settled versus what’s still live — in physics, in philosophy — is worth sitting with. More of that territory next time. Look out for more posts and news a