Free Will

Free Will is one of the major fault-lines running through Kyle’s library, with his sources staking out sharply opposed positions. On the skeptical end, Yuval Noah Harari argues across Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century that organisms are algorithms with no single “authentic self”: ~99% of choices are shaped by biological, social, and cultural forces, and belief in free will makes people easiest to manipulate — because they refuse to acknowledge they can be manipulated by drugs, genetic engineering, or direct brain stimulation. Harari’s twist is that renouncing the illusion “kindles a profound curiosity”: freedom “isn’t something you automatically have; it is something you must struggle for.”

Against that determinism stands a Mormon-theological account of radical agency. Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling (where Kyle’s own Free Will tag sits) describes self-existing intelligences who are “radically free” — their nature “not predetermined by their creator”; God is “the most intelligent of the free intelligences,” a teacher rather than a maker, and “the universe is a school” in which each will must choose to ally with God or not. The Faith of a Scientist reconciles this with physics: Henry Eyring reads quantum mechanics’ uncertainty principle as overturning mechanical determinism and “tending to confirm that fundamental Christian tenet that man enjoys free agency as a divine gift.”

The dystopian and science-fiction sources dramatize the stakes. Brave New World engineers choice away — a caste system whose Alphas “couldn’t fail to be unstable” — to manufacture stability, the same loss of will Anthem indicts (“there is no will save the will of all men together”). Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (in Stories of Your Life and Others) reframes the problem entirely: foreknowledge and free will can coexist as artifacts of which mode of consciousness you inhabit — a life read variationally becomes a “completed shape,” so knowing the future and freely living it are complementary, not opposed. The concept also surfaces in Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom and the gospel-study note 1 Nephi 16–22 — I Will Prepare the Way before You.

Context: Free will is the long-running philosophical question of whether human choices are genuinely free or determined by prior causes — debated between hard determinism, libertarian free will, and compatibilism, and increasingly entangled with neuroscience and the predictive power of data.

Where this appears

• Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling — self-existing intelligences “radically free” to ally with God or not; the universe as a school.
• Homo Deus — organisms as algorithms with no authentic self; desires manipulable absent free will.
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century — 99% of choices shaped by outside forces; belief in free will as a barrier to self-knowledge and a manipulation risk.
• The Faith of a Scientist — quantum uncertainty read as confirming free agency against mechanistic determinism.
• Brave New World — engineering away independent choice to preserve social stability.
• Brave New World Revisited — Huxley’s nonfiction follow-up on the erosion of autonomy.
• Anthem — the individual will against collectivist “will of all men together.”
• Stories of Your Life and Others / Story of Your Life — Chiang’s reconciliation of foreknowledge and free will.
• Charlie Munger — A Lesson on Elementary Worldly Wisdom — appears amid Munger’s discussion of human judgment.
• 1 Nephi 16–22 — I Will Prepare the Way before You — agency in the gospel-study frame.