This one-page sci-fi short story by Ted Chiang, published in Nature, the science journal, dramatizes the Libet experiments and free will denial

Behind the scenes... I cut this section for length before submitting to The Missouri Review.

The science fiction writer, Ted Chiang—whose “Story of your Life” was adapted into the film Arrival—published a one-page fiction about free will in the scientific journal Nature in 2005. In the story, a new and addictive handheld gadget called “The Predictor” becomes extremely popular. Consisting only of an indicator light and a button, the Predictor seemed to know that you were about to press the button before you pressed it. Without fail, the light flashes one full second before you press the button.

“Most people say that when they first try it, it feels like they’re playing a strange game,” the narrator says, “one where the goal is to press the button after seeing the flash, and it’s easy to play. But when you try to break the rules, you find that can’t. If you try to press the button without having seen a flash, the flash immediately appears, and no matter how fast you move, you never push the button until a second has elapsed.” If you don’t press the button, the light doesn’t flash. “No matter what you do, the light always precedes the button press,” by one second exactly.

The way the device works, according to the fictional science in the story, is that when you press the button you activate “a negative time delay circuit” that “sends a signal back in time one second,” turning on the indicator light one second in the past. The narrator of the story is from the future, when negative time delays of greater than one second have been achieved. He is sending us this message from one year into our future via a one-year negative time delay communication device.

It’s a clever idea for a story.

The Predictors become a societal menace because they “demonstrate that there’s no such thing as free will.” How do they do that? (And would it really be a menace to society?) Remember the delay is always one second exactly. If you see the light and quickly try to press the button faster than a second, you would feel frozen, unable to do so. (Because the only reason the light illuminates is because you have “already” pressed the button one second into the future.) And then when you inevitably press it in exactly one second, you would feel caused to do it, like a puppet on a string. But feeling frozen or like a puppet is not the strongest deflation of free will.

According to the time travel science aspect of the story, the light’s being lit up has already happened and so things cannot be otherwise. And in a sense that goes for your coming button press too. The light has lit up now only because in the future one second forward you must have or will must have pressed the button sending the signal back one second in time to illuminate the light. The one-second negative time delay conceit shows what believers in causal determinism have been saying in the free will debate, namely that if an action is determined, that is no different from it being pre-determined.

“There have always been arguments showing that free will is an illusion, some based on hard physics, others based on pure logic,” the narrator says. “Most people agree these arguments are irrefutable, but no one ever really accepts the conclusion. The experience of having free will is too powerful for an argument to overrule. What it takes is a demonstration, and that’s what a Predictor provides.”

The effect on the population is devastating. “A third of those who play with a Predictor must be hospitalized because they won’t feed themselves. The end state is akinetic mutism, a kind of waking coma… The ability to move remains, but the motivation is gone.” The affliction spreads “like a cognitive plague,” says the narrator. “People used to speculate about a thought that destroys the thinker, some unspeakable Lovecraftian horror, or a Gödel sentence that crashes the human logical system. It turns out that the disabling thought is one that we’ve all encountered: the idea that free will doesn’t exist. It just wasn’t harmful until you believed it.”

The narrator wishes to warn us that we must continue to believe, or at least pretend to believe, in free will. “It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t… Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.”¹

And yet the narrator admits that he knows who among our population will descend into akinetic mutism and who won’t. “And my sending this warning won’t alter those proportions,” he says. “So why did I do it? Because I had no choice.”

1. Yes, it always has. But I am extremely interested in the tiny, but important difference, between the two cases. Previously we were self-deceiving but without really realizing it. Now we need to self-deceive but we realize we need to. And that makes it complicated.