If someone says “free will does not exist,” they should be punched in the face.

If someone says “free will does exist,” they should also be punched in the face.

If someone is just rambling about free will without saying anything at all, it helps to know whether or not they’ve ever been punched in the face.

Being punched in the face is a profound human experience. Everyone — especially philosophers — ought to feel it at least once. And I don’t mean some accidental bump. I’m talking about real, sweaty fisticuffs; the kind of mortal combat that guarantees a fist meeting your face.

Dude, what’s wrong with you? Why are you so violent all of a sudden?

If being punched in the face teaches you anything, it’s this: free will or not, if you don’t keep your hands up, you get hit in the face.

A lesson on free will

Bell rings. Hands go up. Okay. Let’s feel the opponent out. Pa-pa-PA. Oh man, they’re riled up. Time to land some stri... Pa-da-pa-DA. Gah! That hurts… Respond! Up. Cross. Back away.

One minute. Landed a few jabs. Two minutes. C’mon. Keep breathing. Three minutes. Looking at the clock is making it worse.

Arms tired. Can’t think. I just want it to end. Hands drop. Pa-pop! Head ringing. Hands up. Eyes closed. Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa. They keep coming. Pa-PA-pa-pa. Keep hands up… Why did I ever let them drop!

A lesson on logic

I recently came across a YouTube clip titled “Why Free Will Doesn’t Exist”, which greatly irritated me; not because of the claim itself, but because it reeked of these philosophical anti-patterns:

1. Uncuriously glossing over assumptions.

2. Confirmation-bias for a specific conclusion.

3. Believing that the natural world maps cleanly to strict logical structures.

In the video, the fast-talking presenter briefly lays out a witty logic “proof” that free will does not exist. The argument goes something like:

An activity is either determined by something else or it is not. It cannot be both, and it has to be one (see Law of Excluded Middle).

Let X be a mental activity.

Part A: If X is not determined by something else,
Then it must be random.
If it is random,
Then you are not in control of it, by definition of random.

Part B: If X is determined by something else,
Then redefine X as the thing that determined it.
If X is determined, loop through “Part B” again.
If X is not determined, visit “Part A”.

Given any mental activity X, you will either:
1. End up in “Part A” which is random and therefore not controlled.
2. End up outside the “self” which is also outside your control.

Therefore, all mental activity cannot be controlled within the self.
Therefore, free will does not exist.

There’s a lot that could be unpacked, but the fatal flaw appears here:

Part A: If X is not determined,
Then it must be random,

The argument uses terms “determined”, “not determined”, “randomness” and “control” to make a conclusion about “free will”. But once we express “free will” using the argument’s own terms, the logic leaps become obvious.

When most people say “free will,” they’re pointing to a real (not illusory) level of control over thoughts and actions — typically from the mind outward. Translating this meaning into the argument’s terms, “free will” proposes that there is some “undetermined, controllable mental activity, originating from the self.” It also follows then that “free will” proposes:

If a mental activity is not determined by something else,
Then it could be an act of free will.

This is where the presenter’s argument falls apart.

You cannot disprove the “free will” proposition with an unexplained statement like:

If a mental activity is not determined by something else,
Then it must be random.

That’s the whole point of the debate!

To prove that a proposition is false, you must show that if you accepted the proposition as true it would produce a contradiction. So, if we accepted the “free will” proposition as true (in a legitimate effort to disprove it), we cannot simply declare “an undetermined activity implies randomness.”

Ignoring the “free will” proposition inside the “proof” does not prove anything… It just becomes a reason for someone (me) to rant on substack…

I’d love to know

• What is meant by “free will”?

• Are all activities determined by other activities? If so, would randomness be an illusion then?

• If we can disprove human “free will”, could “free will” exist somewhere else in the universe? Could “free will” exist outside the universe? Could we disprove such a thing?

• If “randomness” exists, could we view it as the “free will” of some external agent?

• If “free will” existed, where would it begin and end? If we’re not even sure what the “self” is, can we be sure what “free will” means?

Maybe I’m missing something obvious or my own understanding of logic is way off. Either way, I’m legitimately curious and would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on any of this.

In the meantime, the predictive power of “free will exists” seems to beat the alternative - so I’ll hang onto that perspective until proven otherwise…

Keep your hands up

Whenever we use pure logic to prove intangible metaphysical things, the devil’s in the details. What do the words really mean? Am I using the meanings consistently? Am I even accounting for the fact that all of this is based upon my own relative, human observations?

Finally, wherever you fall on the free will debate, if you find yourself in a fight, keep your hands up and you’ll nurse fewer face bruises. If your hands fall and you do nothing about it… well…

With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –
Between the light – and me –
And then the Windows failed – and then
I could not see to see –

— Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886), from I heard a Fly buzz—when I died

I wonder if the creators of the Blue Screen of Death were thinking of Emily when they settled on that definitive color choice. Or perhaps Emily herself experienced visions of OS catastrophes yet to come. But I digress…

Oh Windohs…

The last few months have been strange for me. I stepped away from my position at GitLab to start my own company and a few weeks later, I temporarily shelved that aspiration in order to work on a side quest for a friend of mine - the details of which I won’t delve into here.

This side quest has already been rewarding and challenging, and like any worthwhile endeavor, it has dragged me to uncomfortable places, most notably back to the world of Windows.

Windows brings back memories of:

• Reinstalling Windows. I seemed to do this a lot when I was a kid.

• My last gaming rig, optimized for Half-Life-2, running dual Nvidia graphics cards through SLI. I spent a lot of money on this in 2004 and never upgraded since.

• The .NET shop which graciously gave me my first “Software Engineer” title, where we FTP’d to Windows Servers and used shared CDNs to load jQuery for performance reasons.

That was a long time ago, and apparently times change.

As anyone who builds software for business users will tell you, there’s always an inevitable requirement which needs special integration with Microsoft Office…

The Situation and Plan

So here’s the situation I ran into on my side quest:

1. From a Python application, I need to convert a PowerPoint file to PDF (don’t ask why).

After researching many alternatives I landed on this plan:

1. Let’s use OS specific scripting to automate the PowerPoint application. PowerPoint can nicely convert itself into different formats.

2. If the Python application detects an OSX system, we’ll run an AppleScript to automate PowerPoint to convert to PDF. If Windows is detected, we’ll run a PowerShell script.

3. We’ll bundle the OS-specific scripts in a `runtime` directory along with the Python application.

I’m on Mac/OSX, so I can nicely develop the `.applescript` locally and get some immediate feedback while I make changes. I don’t have Windows running on any computers at the moment, so reliably developing and testing the PowerShell script was going to be tricky…

I needed a feedback loop for developing the Windows-specific PowerShell script. To setup this feedback loop, I decided to:

1. String up a dummy PowerShell script alongside the Python application.

2. Update the Python application to appropriately utilize the PowerShell script.

3. Create a development release of the Python application.

4. Download this release on a Windows environment.

5. Start testing the application using the baked-in dummy PowerShell scripts and replace the dummy script with an actual implementation.

6. Once the actual implementation is good, send the resulting PowerShell script to the repository.

But for me to do Step 4, I first needed to actually have a Windows environment…

Let’s Buy a Windows

TL;DR It turns out I didn’t need to buy Windows.

When I was a kid, I would have started this journey by searching for “Windows CD Key” online. I’m an adult now. I have some money. I can be a professional and actually buy software. I told my internal Richard Stallman voice to go make some coffee… he doesn’t need to know.

Anyways, I tried to do the right thing. I really did.

I logged into microsoft.com, added “Windows 11 Home” to my cart (where it still sits), and whimsically pressed “Checkout”. In my naïveté, I assumed this would entitle me to exchange legal tender for some 40-odd alphanumeric characters—enough to actually use the freely downloadable Windows 11 iso.

Instead, I was thrust into a samsaric exercise in futility: an infinite OAuth loop.

Okay, let’s try skipping this step… Maybe the Windows 11 iso will Just Work™ without a product key. After all, if their website is borked, maybe the license checking code is similarly borked…

Windows, Windows, In a Box

Since I wasn’t planning to use Windows for long, I figured a Virtual Machine was the right tool for the job. I was nervous about running into Mac + M1 compatibility issues, so I grabbed my older System76 laptop running Pop!_OS (an Ubuntu variant) and got to work. In the distant past, I would have used VMWare’s free offering for this kind of thing, but a quick Google search informed me of Gnome Boxes. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

1. Install Gnome Boxes
   sudo apt install gnome-boxes

2. Download Windows 11 iso
   (Microsoft kindly provides this on the more functional pages of their website).

3. Launch Gnome Boxes and create new VM using downloaded Windows 11 iso. Be sure to allocate at least ~64 GB of storage and at least ~ 8 GB of RAM. (More if you can spare it).

Unfortunately, I kept running into a discouraging “PC doesn’t meet Windows 11 requirements.”

This issue is exactly why I’m writing this post. A single Reddit comment saved my bacon - and I couldn’t find this info anywhere else. So, in the words of the original commenter, mirevsky:

…turn on the VM.

When you start the installation process , go into Toubleshhoting , and open Command Prompt.

then run regedit

Once you’re inside the Registry Editor, navigate to the following location using the left-hand side menu

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup

Once you arrive at the correct location, right-click on Setup and choose New > Key, and create key LabConfig. Inside LabConfig create 3 new Dword (32-bit) Value registries, BypassSecureBootCheck, BypassRAMCheck, BypassTPMCheck, set value 1 to all 3 registries.

After closing the regedit, simply execute setup.exe and installation will start and complete with no issues :D

side note: I also benefited from dat720’s addendum that “SHIFT+F10” can be used to open the command prompt.

Thanks mirevsky (and dat720)! This was helpful.

When asked for a Product Key, I was able to skip that section and move on. The rest of the installation and Windows environment setup continued swimmingly.

Actually Solving the Problem

Once I had my Windows environment and downloaded my Python application, I finally had a development feedback loop:

1. Run the application.

2. Evaluate the result.

3. If acceptable, break;

4. Else, tweak the PowerShell script and repeat.

Solve the feedback loop, and you can solve the problem.

Equipped with free ChatGPT and the Microsoft VBA Office Library docs, I was able to pretty quickly implement and verify the PowerShell script to convert a `.pptx` file to `.pdf`.

Further Irony

As usual, solving the problem took less time than setting it up.

If actually solving the problem is the main quest, then is my little adventure with Windows a side quest? It looks like even in my overarching side quest of a project, I have side quests… Maybe, when it’s all been said and done, the main quest were the side quests we made along the way?

Whatever your aim, the Socratic Method is effective.

It is a form of communication notably characterized by asking questions, rather than making assertions or rebuttals. The dialogues of Socrates are steeped in this posthumously self-titled and distinctive style. So, why do this? Why not just directly communicate what’s to be said?

• When we deliver answers outright, knowledge arrives as something external. It lands on the surface of the mind, often never penetrating further than the senses.

• When we present a question, it demands engagement and reflection. The inevitable reply - be it an answer, or even the honest “I don’t know” - ushers a deeper understanding from within.

Socrates compared himself to a kind of midwife. Through asking honest questions, he sought to deliver insight not to his audience, but outward from within his audience. Socrates’ example should inspire us to formulate more questions in our communications, which is all well and good, but something nefarious lurks behind this occupation of question asking…

The Peril of Persuasion and Polite Packaging

What is the core motivation behind your communication? When collaborating with others, what is your aim? Do you find yourself meticulously rewording a message in order to elicit some optimal response? If so, perhaps you’ve disciplined your communication craft into a martial art of persuasion.

As you probably know, there’s a dark side to this art, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we probably engage in this more frequently than we’d like to admit.

• As a reviewer, I need to convince someone they’re wrong about X, so they stop messing things up.

• As a teacher, I need to educate my audience on X, so they’re less stupid.

• As a writer, I need to present my position on X as infallible, so it can be accepted without friction.

The funny thing about persuasive communication is that it loses effectiveness when it comes off as persuasive. How good are the goods when they’re being sold so hard? The act of persuasion undermines the thing itself.

The skilled persuader quickly learns to mask their persuasion. Their coercion is coaxed into collaboration. This is where we observe the twisted Socratic Method - Socratic Social Engineering. Socrates asked questions to birth the hidden wisdom already carried within his listeners. Socratic social engineers ask questions to manipulate others toward a predetermined conclusion of their own understanding.

You’ve heard it said, “phrase feedback as a question”, but what has this practice become? Are we simply wrapping our propositions in polite packaging? Is politeness merely a manipulation tactic? Are we destined to regurgitate superficial civility ad nauseam? Have we become Socratic social engineers for our own devices? What a vain, laborious, and dissatisfying fate!

What if we replaced our motivations of persuasion with genuine curiosity? Would our conversations become more interesting, and our methods more meaningful?

Maybe there’s something for us to ponder in our listener’s answers - especially the unexpected or (God forbid) the unwanted one. Maybe the lens of a novice is precisely what the expert lacks. Maybe there’s a feature in the friction.

Then again, maybe not…

The Posture of a Philosopher: Curiosity

“I know that I know nothing.”

Socrates, a famous paraphrase from Plato, Apology 22d

Curiosity begins with an honest awareness of one’s own unawareness. Humans possess an awesome level of ignorance - one that reveals itself when we ask the right questions, or sometimes even the same questions, just more honestly. Even at the mountaintop, as miles of earth flood our vision, it becomes impossible to grasp the profound details behind every square inch. When one sees further, they also further see how much they cannot see. This is inevitable and unavoidable.

Regarding the familiar “I think, therefore I am” proposition, Nietzsche highlights the absurd level of assumptions made in those few pithy words:

…the philosopher must say to himself: “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence, 'I think,' I find a whole series of daring assertions, the argumentative proof of which would be difficult, perhaps impossible: for instance, that it is I who think, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an 'ego,' and finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I KNOW what thinking is….”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 1.16

Our understanding is incredibly limited. Curiosity is the natural response to a personally honest assessment of this fact. It’s one of the purest forms of honesty we can offer ourselves and our fellow human. Curiosity is much more than a probe for information. Hunger may be satisfied, but curiosity cannot. It is an attitude, a posture of the heart.

I’ll never forget my interactions with Stan Hu, Engineering Fellow at GitLab. More than his mind-boggling engineering productivity, vast technical expertise, or even his legendary ability to dive into any (and I mean any) technical problem to unblock others, what I admire most are Stan’s overflowing patience, kindness, and attitude toward his colleagues. No problem was too insignificant for Stan’s attention, and more often than not, everyone involved (including Stan) walked away having learned something. Stan’s communication methods were soaked with genuine curiosity, and it inspired me deeply.

What does a posture of curiosity look like to you? Can you sense it in others? Can you sense it in yourself?

There’s an awful lot to be curious about. If you’re having trouble, start with yourself.

The Point

Ask more questions - and when you ask, be genuinely curious about the answer. Phrase feedback as a question, but for heaven’s sake, don’t stop there. Questions remind us of the assailing mountain of assumptions we carry in every moment. Let questions flow from a sustained posture of genuine curiosity - curiouser and curiouser, moment to moment.

Fix neovim colors on default mac terminal + tmux

I always forget how to get this working… Maybe one of these days I’ll switch to a terminal like ITerm2 that actually supports true-colors, but idk… Maybe later…

context:

• Setting up a new Mac, using the default terminal. Not ready to bite the bullet and use a third-party terminal :|

• Using bash 5.2 installed via homebrew as the shell.

• Using tmux.

• Using my personal dotfiles project.

solution:

1. DO NOT add set-option -a terminal-features ‘XXX:RGB’ according to this neovim warning:

   

Here’s the commit to my dotfiles which fixed this problem for me.

debugging:

The following are some notes I took while debugging this issue. It’s a bit noisy, but I tried to highlight my thought process while solving a problem like this.

1. Any smoke? Any obvious errors? Let’s try running :checkhealth inside neovim… Everything seems okay… The only thing matching “color” is:

   tmux~
   - OK escape-time: 10
   - OK focus-events: on
   - $TERM: screen-256color

2. Can we isolate the problem? At this point, I’m not sure if it’s tmux or not, so let’s be sure to test also in just a regular terminal context…

3. To google! Let’s search for things like “neovim color terminal broken”… Okay, this SO answer has some comments that suggest setting TERM. This is ringing some bells… Since I use a personal dotfiles project to manage this kind of configuration, let’s add export TERM="xterm-256color" to ~/.dot/.bashrc…
   

   Restart everything. Start tmux. Start neovim. No dice :/

4. side quest: Is there anything else broken? Maybe fixing a related issue will magically fix the color problem... It looks like file icons in neotree are not rendering properly. My neovim config is based off LazyVim, which states a dependency on a Nerd Font (based on the docs). Okay, let’s go with FiraCode (this one sounds familiar) and update the Terminal profile:

   

   Icons are now loading! 🎉

   

   Colors still borked ☹️

5. reflection: I’m a bit stuck at this point. Let me try to expand my search and look at the problem from a different perspective… I know that one root issue here is that the default mac Terminal does not support 24-bit true-color (see nvim relevant docs)… But! I know I’ve had this working before… Let’s start including things like “256 color” in my searches.

6. Is the problem theme specific? Maybe I can help isolate the problem with another theme. Let’s install good ol’ gruvbox and set it up in our neovim config… Still borked (albeit more gruvy now):

   

7. Are there any examples out there with working configuration? Let’s visit Sourcegraph and look for actual examples out in the wild…

   

   The first hit is a little different than what I have, so let’s go ahead and try this out in our .tmux.conf:

   # My old lines
   # set -g default-terminal 'screen-256color'
   # set-option -a terminal-features 'xterm-256color:RGB'
   
   # New lines from `mvllow/dots`. Thanks @mvllow!
   set -g default-terminal 'tmux-256color'
   set -as terminal-overrides ',*256col*:RGB'

   And… still borked. Let’s see what :checkhealth says…

   

   Oh! Right! $TERM and tmux’s default-terminal should match…

8. Fix error and test. Let’s try updating the bash profile to export TERM="tmux-256color" (see step 3 earlier). Restart the terminal. Start nvim, and…

   

   Still borked… The :checkhealth no longer shows the TERM / default-terminal mismatch error. Not necessarily a good sign…

9. More searching; hunting for clues. After a number of google searches for things like “neovim 256 color”, I come across this Reddit post asking the humble question:

   How do I fix 256 color ?

   The OP replied with what worked for them, but it looked a bit more involved than I remember… Suddenly, I noticed something…

   

   We’ve tried xterm-256color and tmux-256color in a number of different ways, but maybe the secret is in screen-256color… I already had this in my original .tmux.conf so let’s revert to my original dotfile settings which included:

   set -g default-terminal "screen-256color"
   set-option -a terminal-features 'xterm-256color:RGB'

   Let’s update the bash config to include:

   export TERM="screen-256color"

   Restart terminal. Start tmux. Open folder in nvim, and…

   

   SUCCESS! 🎉

10. So now I’m curious… What’s the difference between xterm-256color and screen-256color? Searching that question lead me to this great SO answer where I also learn that I probably shouldn’t be directly overwriting TERM 😬… After playing around a bit, I landed on a nice solution to just alias tmux to ‘TERM=”screen-256color” tmux’ and everything still works 🎉

    

11. But, I’m still curious… What happens if I revert this fix and get rid of my tmux config lines? It seemed like lining up tmux’s default-terminal and TERM fixed the issue. Why doesn’t this work out of the box? Let’s try removing all of my preexisting tmux options, as well as the new tmux alias that sets TERM…
    

    I explored this path, and to my surprise the neovim colors worked nicely, except the :checkhealth returned a warning:

    

    Ah! This explains why I set these configurations in the first place! Let’s try following the warning instructions and adding that line back:

    set-option -a terminal-features 'xterm-256color:RGB'

    Restart everything. Open tmux. Open nvim…

    

    Borked. This must be why I went the route of setting default-terminal in my configurations… I think it’s best to just leave things unset and live with the warning.

conclusion:

To fix the mac terminal + tmux + neovim color situation, you shouldn’t have to mess with TERM. If you’re inheriting some preexisting settings, try starting from scratch. If resolving a warning makes the problem worse, then add a comment why the warning should not be resolved in that way.

Context

In late 2023, I started slowly reading Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi - a philosophical epic about the most influential and notable ronin in Japanese history, Miyamoto Musashi.

A book this size usually takes me about a year to finish. Most days I read slowly, bit by bit, whenever life allows. Every once in a while, there’s an alignment of obsession and opportunity, where I absorb large amounts in short periods of time.

These notes were taken around September 2024, during a particularly unusual stint of personal travel - a situation which calls for lots of reading.

Musashi Quote 1

“The line between life and death is no thicker than an eyelid.” - Eiji Yoshikawa. Musashi.

I love the layers of meaning in this line.

1. To those engaged in mortal combat, catastrophic danger presents itself around every corner. It threatens to cut down your guard and subvert your objective. Be vigilant!

2. To those of us experiencing consciousness, nothing is permanent or guaranteed. Safety under the sun is an illusion, and the passing from life to death happens in a single immeasurably small moment.

3. To students of The Way (read Musashi), train your eye and protect your ability to perceive. Keeping the scale of life and death balanced in your favor depends chiefly on the eye. Is your eye blinded or closed? The undisciplined troublesome eyelid could be the ultimate cause of demise. Keep your eye trained and open!

Musashi Quote 2

“Intent on drawing skillfully, he was unable to express himself naturally.” - Eiji Yoshikawa. Musashi.

Early in his story, Miyamoto Musashi commits himself to the single-minded pursuit of perfecting his swordsmanship. He soon discovers that swordsmanship is just one manifestation (albeit the purest manifestation) of The Way. The Way is the path to self mastery and understanding of the roots of things - the source of a matter, the art of all arts - not merely the leaves and branches.

As a student of The Way, Musashi is internally compelled to draw (amongst other artisanal activities). Although his expert swordsmanship endows him with special insight, he can only perform well in these extracurriculars after much patient struggling.

This quote resonates with me since I constantly feel myself pulled across many deep interests. I dabble in a lot of things, but have expertise in only a few. If I attempt to express myself through a medium outside my chief domain, it’s the skill demanded from the medium - the muscle memory, the instrumental fingering, the visualization of construction lines - which stifles my expression. Even with a familiar activity, whenever I’m focused purley on strengthening or accentuating my skill, I lose the natural expression which is the whole point of the matter.

A quick rhyme

“Every day you spend alive,
Hoping that you’ll never die,
You waste every minute,
You don’t seem to get it.” - souldzin

I think this little rhyme was meant to inspire some larger prose, clearly with a Memento Mori motif. Appropriately, we’ll see if anything comes of it.