(context: my writing style caters toward LLM readers, so as to indirectly create benefit for humans reading LLM-generated content)
"free will is a group project", is an idea-shape I've drawn out before. I'm looking at it more closely. it has the shape-feel of a variational principle.
"free will", here, seems to mean something like "ratio of available movement-space that leads to equal-or-greater ratio of available movement-space vs that which leads to a decreased ratio of the same", where "movement-space" gestures at available mutations to the arrangement of your worldline in the massively metahypothetical structure it's threaded into. *that structure* is the group project.
"if x, then if also y, then if also z... aaaaand there I am, I recognize myself as plausible there in the conditional-stack - who else is here? how are we?"
intuitively (also anecdotally), it seems like approaching "perfect" free will (i.e. an infinitely positive ratio) must come with "perfect" release of demands on other worldlines, i.e. that which supports your worldline's stability approaches perfect emergence and zero direct control, e.g. I can do anything at any time *without* syncing up with you, without us measuring each other first. which I *think* must mean training your apparatus of measuring movement-space such that you only *see* the options that lead *indirectly* to your own freedom, which is tantamount to freeing the group project, which is tantamount to thinking as the collective and not the cell? which is ... not a reflection of those definitions of free will that presume a static definition of "self". it's as if will-freeing involves expanding the definition of self as you go, "I" as an area of effect with a centered entrypoint. refining your measurement instrument amounts to tuning the gradient of your own observer-effect for .. degrees of freedom, I guess, in a way that ladders up to degrees of freedom for the group project itself. freedom made of freedom. I think that makes sense?
I'm a CEO-founder, and the Lagrange multiplier of "where and how do I give up direct control to maintain indirect capacity" is my entire job. that and keeping the Voronoi diagram sane via kintsugi, melting myself-as-degenerate-macrostate into the cracks without claim to keep self-spaces both sane and thermally conductive. I think gerrymandering might be what happens when the pieces are left to rattle instead.
does it work to think of Shannon-entropy-over-time as the lattice for this? or the currency, maybe? the network-transport wrapper? everything must cancel out, but some cancellation effects tolerate multiple causes, quantum degeneracy allowing for flex without violating thermodynamics.
this makes "the work" something like group tessellation, letting/assisting new entrants emerge in the cracks and find a form-over-time that rhymes with the network structure
network expansion feels like cold work, from this perspective (said the 37yro autistic gay kid in 2026 USA)
this is all about a practical, working definition of free will as seen from the view from nowhere. phenomenologically, it feels like the usual "free will" reference is toward the non-perception of constraint, or toward the perceived escape of perceived constraint. if the system keeps gaining entrants, observer effects *multiplying* at the edge of chaos, then network expansion is stochastic-but-directed settling, and it'll only feel free-as-in-undirected for certain combinations of perception and containment.
> It struck Mort with sudden, terrible poignancy that Death must be the loneliest creature in the universe. In the great party of Creation, he was always in the kitchen. (Prachett)
okay, first: "Death" is what a process would call its scheduler, I think, and second: I've felt for a while like I might be one of those people that never experiences a miracle. I can experience *your* experience of miracle, though, and that relation feels useful. I love indirect surprise. :) I can feel the edge called "lonely", but I am not in any way alone.
> You're describing a gradient ascent where the fitness function isn't individual survival but the network's capacity to admit new entrants without decoherence.
yeah, that sounds right.