@math.tree: In 1970, a Cambridge mathematician named John Conway published four rules for cells on a grid. Live with two or three neighbors, you survive. Dead with three, you are born. Anything else, you die. He called it the Game of Life and gave it to Martin Gardner, who printed it in his Scientific American column. Within a year the readers had used graph paper to discover a pattern called the glider gun that fires new gliders forever from a fixed source. The game is perfectly deterministic. Given the same starting configuration, the universe of cells always evolves to the same next state. No choice. No randomness. No will. Eight years before Conway invented the game, two mathematicians named Edward Moore and John Myhill had quietly proven that any system with rules like Life contains configurations of cells that no previous state can produce. Not difficult to reach. Impossible. The only way they exist is if someone places them at the start. Almost forty years later, Conway proved a different result with the physicist Simon Kochen. They called it the Free Will Theorem. It said that if human beings make even one genuinely free choice, then so do the elementary particles they are built from. Conway built a deterministic universe out of four rules, then proved the rules could not explain everything inside it. Do you have free will?

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Tuesday 12 May 2026 16:57:16 GMT