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I’m entering a midlife crisis. I know that I can not continue in the direction I’m going, but I’m not sure where to go next. One thing is clear: I want to make a positive impact. Here’s an exploration into my calling.

Over the past few years, I’ve gained some clarity about what’s important to me.

  • Sustainability. I want my kids and their potential kids to have just as wonderful of a world as we have now.
  • Freedom. I want there to be greater ability for people to pursue their interests and to choose how they live their lives.
  • Common wealth: I want there to be more good things that are shared by all. We are used to having shared roads and powerlines. I think we all could benefit if we had more in common.
  • Unity with the natural world. We are part of the natural world. Success for me means that all of nature is thriving
  • Cooperation: I love it when people get together and work through their differences. We can do great things and solve difficult problems together!

So I want to find a way to do more to advance these aspirations. Unfortunately, when I look at the world I see problems that are taking away from these values. I want to understand these problems so that we can address them.

Our changing world

First some observations about the world we live in:

  • Global energy use was 286 TWh in 1987 versus 2,476 TWh  in 2024. The energy use growth rate was around 3.62% in 1987 and 2.61% in 2024.1
  • Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased from 349ppm to 431ppm in my lifetime (1987-2026). Global temperatures have gone up about 1C in the same time.2
  • The human population was 5.05 billion in 1987 and in 2023 was 8.09 billion. Global fertility rate was 3.48 live births per woman in 1987 and in 2023 was 2.5 live births per woman.4

These are well established facts, and suggest that the world is changing. There are more of us humans and collectively we are using massively more energy than we have in the past. Much of this energy is from fossil fuels and there is an associated increase in global CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. But importantly the growth rate of energy use and of human population is slowing.

There have been other things changing as well that are more difficult to measure and probably more controversial.

The connection between all of these items is growth. Energy use, population, wealth have all been increasing exponentially. It has been called the Great Acceleration.12 This growth has created amazing benefits especially for the wealth, but also comes at an increasing cost.

My take on the costs of growth

The ever increasing demands of our civilization lead to resource exploitation. Now all the easy sources of fossil fuels and minerals are being used up, so people are exploiting ever more difficult reserves and at an increasing cost to humans and to the planet. The explosive spreading of our civilization, puts pressure on the rest of the web of life. So our growth — all the farms, cities, roads, and mines — relentlessly encroaches on habitat for wildlife leading to a decrease in the collective mass of plants and animals. The disruption of ecosystems is decreasing the biodiversity worldwide. Many amazing species which have evolved over millions of years are going extinct.

This same increasing pressure is also affecting humans. Growth leads to concentration of wealth among the elite and the top companies. More complex organizations and economic structures are needed to sustain the massive human civilization. These are harnessed by those in power to enrich themselves by exploiting other humans.

The European great powers and the United States grew their power and empires through colonialism and slavery. Now that the economy has been globalized, this exploitation is happening everywhere in new ways. I see that happening now in the US. Good paying jobs are drying up. Software services are entshittifying.13 Government is being taken over by the interests of the rich. Gig economy jobs advertise flexibility and entrepreneurship, but in reality are oppressive management by algorithm. We are manipulated through surveillance and targeted ads, and our data is being used to train AI technology aimed at replacing the majority of professions. Our civilization is beginning to eat itself.

Despite these problems, it’s not easy to slow growth. People generally love growth (if not population growth, then definitely economic growth). I love it too. It’s wonderful in the beginning. Each generation has a better life than the last. With more people and more economic power, there is more science, arts, and culture.

In the US, our whole society is built on growth. We rely on growing 401k’s to retire. Our social security program is designed around many young workers providing support to relatively fewer elderly adults. In the US, we worry about “falling behind” if our economy is no longer the most powerful (although we never seem to worry about the rest of the world falling behind). So we all have an incentive to keep this growth going at all costs.

It’s a death spiral. This dependence on growth is creating a positive feedback loop that encourages this growth. We are speeding faster and faster towards widespread extinctions of wild animals and plants.

It doesn’t make sense to me. I intend to pull out of this death spiral and to contribute towards a more sustainable way of living. I have a ways to go. We are currently living an American lifestyle: two internal combustion engine cars, natural gas heating and cooking, air conditioning in the summer, consuming meat, and using smartphones and other technology devices.

Addressing concerns

Some of you might strongly disagree with the previous section. Many see growth not as the problem but as the solution. With more people and more resources available to each person, there is a greater chance of new ideas that will address the environmental problems.

This is the promise of green growth, and in a lot of ways it is happening now. We are in the midst of this turn towards clean tech: the cost of solar and wind power is getting lower and lower, there are a variety of promising new battery chemistries, and new approaches to nuclear and geothermal power are coming online. On the conservation front, scientists are tracking more and more species and finding innovative ways to protect species on the brink of extinction. Wildlife tourism can provide economic support for maintaining protected areas. And as we push up against the finite boundaries of this planet, we can reach for the stars. SpaceX is proposing a million datacenters in space, to colonize Mars, and to mine asteroids. There is the promise of almost limitless clean, solar energy in space, many of mineral resources that can be exploited, and more room for humans to grow. In this view, the future is bright.

Even more so according to this view, anything that slows this green growth is worse for the planet. If economic growth slows then life becomes hard and desperate for people, and they would be less likely to think of good ideas. We wouldn’t have the capital available to transition to clean energy or to explore outer space. We would be stuck with our current technology which has some serious environmental issues. Culturally it would be horrible because there would be nothing to look forward to. As people struggle to survive, science and the arts would lose funding leading to a decay of our collective knowledge and our culture. It’s a scenario that should be avoided at all costs.

Scenarios of the future

These are valid points, and I agree that we should avoid the scenario of economic contraction before we have gotten on the path toward sustainability. Nate Hagen in his podcast the Great Simplification, calls this scenario the Mad Max scenario.14 The environment continues to be degraded but civilization collapses. But he lays out three other scenarios, one of which we already mentioned, green growth. The scenarios are based on two dimensions, sustainability and economic growth/contraction. Here are the scenarios:

  • Green Growth: growing and sustainable, good for the environment
  • Mordor: growing but unsustainable, horrible for the environment
  • Mad Max: declining/stabilizing but unsustainable, environment gets worse and worse
  • The Great Simplification: stabilizing (after a decline) and sustainable, humanity and nature thrive together

Of these scenarios, I think it is pretty clear that we want to avoid the Mordor and the Mad Max scenarios. In some ways we have been in the Mordor scenario because our civilization has been built on entirely unsustainable fossil fuels. So there can be good that comes out of this scenario, but we don’t want to stay there.

Green Growth is wonderful, while we can sustain it. We definitely need growth in the green parts of our economy to that we can fully shift away from exploitative industries.

The Great Simplification scenario is different. Nate Hagens calls it a simplification because he believes that we have already overshot, we are using more resources than the carrying capacity of the Earth. So he believes a future sustainable civilization would use less energy and resources leading to less complexity. But despite the simpler civilization, humans in this scenario would be thriving with other life on earth and ideally would be able to continue to thrive for thousands or even millions of more years.

Growth will end

Mathematically we know exponential growth will slow at some point. In his book, Energy and Human Ambition on a Finite Planet, Thomas Murphy shows the absurdity of exponential growth continuing indefinitely at the rate it has for the last 100 years.15 He shows convincingly that thermodynamics will stop energy use growth within around 300 years and that economic growth will also stop within a century after. These limits hold even if people attempt to colonize space (barring implausible technology like hyperdrive that either breaks the laws of physics or depends on speculative exotic physics like wormholes). But growth can stop much earlier. Modern human civilization has a lot of different needs. If any of those needs are limited and an effective substitute can not be found, then growth will slow. So it is a question of when exponential growth will stop not if it will stop.

You might find this hard to believe. Humans have been so good at continually improving their technology, that it is hard to bet against growth continuing indefinitely. It’s a reasonable point. We have had 300 years of uninterrupted growth. Why should it stop?

One way to see why growth will stop is to look at the geological record. There have been many breakthroughs in evolution where a new set of species becomes dominant. These eras of rapid change always stop at new equilibria. So maybe a better question is why should this era of rapid change, continue forever when every other era of rapid change has ended?

It is important to remember that even though exponential growth will end, evolution will not end. There can be small changes over time, that could lead to a new era of rapid growth in the future. There still will be history. In terms of the scenarios above, this means that Green Growth will end and then if we are lucky then we can spend a long time in the Great Simplification scenario until the next evolutionary leap.

Now is the time to work towards a sustainable future

Given the increasing costs of growth described above and signs of overshoot, I have become convinced that it’s time to transition away from growth towards a more sustainable future. While I do want the green economy to grow so that it can displace the fossil fuel economy, I don’t want further growth (and further overshoot) after that. Instead, I want to find a way for humans to be in relationship with other life on this planet.

I asked my kids (4 and 7 years old at the time), which would you rather have:

  • a big house, lots of toys, and being able to visit faraway places whenever you like in an airplane, BUT there are very few wild animals.
  • OR
  • you have a small house, few toys, and you take the bus to visit people, BUT there are many wild animals and a thriving wilderness

Without any hesitation, both of our boys said they would rather have a world with wild animals. That seals to deal for me. It’s not just about me, but it’s about preserving the beauty of this world for the subsequent generations.

What direction to go?

I’ve had a variety of topics that I’ve done deep dives in over the past few years. It turns out all of these fields have ideas that could help society become more sustainable.

To shift away from this unsustainable path, we need people who are not afraid to take a different approach to life. Unschooling can help.16 It’s a approach to education where kids are allowed to explore their interests with the help of caring adults. In this kind of environment, kids are shielded from the immense pressure many young people face to do well in school, go to a good university, and to get a good paying job after. So unschooled kids are more free to follow their heart to take bold action to address big problems like climate change. And it’s not just for kids, as I’ve adopted more of an unschooling mindset, I’ve realized that it’s OK to follow where I feel called to act. I wouldn’t be exploring this sustainability path without following my interests. It’s freeing.

I’d love for humans to be an integrated part of the natural ecosystem. I believe we have the potential to be a keystone species that modifies the environment in a way that encourages rich biodiversity. Permaculture is an approach to farming that could help move us in that direction. In permaculture, farmers iteratively design a sustainable ecosystem as the basis for the agricultural system. The goal is not to exploit, but to encourage a thriving ecosystem that will allow us to thrive as well. It’s reflected by the permaculture ethic of earth care, people care, and fair share.

There are issues with permaculture. It has pushed away from academic scholarship, in part as a reaction to the influence of industry in academics. However this has led to over-simplistic claims that take away from the movement.17 But the need for agriculture that is more connected with the ecology remains. I’m interested in more evidence based approaches to sustainable agriculture, but don’t know much about it yet.

Even though I think growth should end, I still would like life to get better over time. I believe we have an amazing opportunity now to expand our common wealth. Anything that can be digitized, which is so much of our modern life, has the potential to be shared widely and benefit all. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has shown the wonderful things that can happen when people share ideas. Much of our digital world is built on these FOSS building blocks. The free culture movement is advocating for the same kinds of sharing in the wider culture. Let’s avoid things like copyrights and patents which limit participants, and instead create a culture of sharing while also encouraging attribution. The common ownership should also extend to our social networks which currently are enriching a handful of wealthy people. It would be wonderful if we could not only participate freely in these social networks but also benefit collectively from the network effects.

To realize these kinds of cultural and societal shifts, I think we will need new ways to organize society. Currently many business organizations are controlled from the top-down. This is helpful for making decisions quickly, but allows the people who control organizations to capture the benefits. This goes against the shared wealth idea. So we need organizations with distributed control, and this requires new approaches to governance. Sociocracy is a promising approach, where decisions are made by consent. To avoid consensus gridlock, areas within an organization are split into small groups, called circles, which have the authority to make decisions about their responsibilities. Not everyone gets their preferences met, but the circle works to resolve serious objections. For larger organizations, there are many circles and they are connected through double links, one person goes to the higher circle and one goes down to the lower circle. This double linking helps to ensure that there is communication from the top-down and from the bottom-up. The end result when it is working well is distributed control. An organization like this could work well in a shared wealth environment because benefits would be shared widely.

What role can I play?

I aspire to contribute to these movements that together could help society transition to a thriving world with limited growth. There are organizations that are doing this work: The Alliance for Self-Directed Education is working to expand unschooling and other forms of self-directed education, The Spritely Institute is working to make FOSS tools for a networked world, and Sociocracy for All is sharing information about sociocracy. I’m sure there are more organizations on other areas. I’m working now to explore this ecosystem and see where I can make an impact.

I’m avoiding working for organizations that are further entrenching inequality and unsustainable growth. Unfortunately, much of the economy is controlled by such organizations. But there is an opportunity here. The current economy does not seem to be working very well for most people. These alternative movements could be the change that people are hoping to see. Ironically the sustainable economy has room to grow. But its growth will be temporary and will hopefully transition into a steady, high quality of life that is broadly shared.

Do these ideas resonate with you? Let’s talk! I’m looking to find others interested in making a difference in these areas. Together we can make an impact. And if you have feedback, advice or constructive criticism I’d like to hear that too.

  1. Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2020) – “Energy Production and Consumption” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-093348/energy-production-consumption.html‘ [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).
  2. Kaitlyn Trudeau and Helen Brush, “Global Temperatures & CO2”, Climate Central, Published online at https://observablehq.com. Retrieved from: ‘https://observablehq.com/@climatecentral/global-temperatures-and-co2‘ on June 25, 2026.
  3. Lan, X., Tans, P. and K.W. Thoning: Trends in globally-averaged CO2 determined from NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory measurements. Version Tuesday, 05-May-2026 05:42:49 MDT https://doi.org/10.15138/9N0H-ZH07
  4. Max Roser (2014) – “The global decline of the fertility rate” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: ‘https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260518-095641/global-decline-fertility-rate.html‘ [Online Resource] (archived on May 18, 2026).
  5. Calvo, G.; Mudd, G.; Valero, A.; Valero, A. Decreasing Ore Grades in Global Metallic Mining: A Theoretical Issue or a Global Reality? Resources 2016, 5, 36. https://doi.org/10.3390/resources5040036
  6. Charles A.S. Hall, Jessica G. Lambert, Stephen B. Balogh, “EROI of different fuels and the implications for society”, Energy Policy, 64, 2014, Pages 141-152, ISSN 0301-4215, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2013.05.049.
  7. Kevin M. A. Parker and Michael R. Mainelli, “What happens if we ‘burn all the carbon’? carbon reserves, carbon budgets, and policy options for governments”, Environ. Sci.: Atmos., 2024, 4, 435-454. https://doi.org/10.1039/D3EA00107E
  8. Greenspoon, L., Ramot, N., Moran, U. et al. The global biomass of mammals since 1850. Nat Commun 16, 8338 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-63888-z
  9. “2024 Living Planet Report” by World Wildlife Foundation. Pdf accessed on June 25, 2026, https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-10/living-planet-report-2024.pdf.
  10. “WORLD INEQUALITY REPORT 2022” by World Inequality Lab. https://wir2022.wid.world/.
  11. Spencer Y. Kwon, Yueran Ma, and Kaspar Zimmermann, “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration”, WORKING PAPER · NO. 2023-20, Becker Friedman Institute. https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/BFI_WP_2023-20.pdf
  12. J. R. McNeill, Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration, Harvard University Press, 2016. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674545038
  13. Cory Doctorow, Enshittification, MacMillan, 2025. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250417602/enshittification/
  14. Nate Hagen, “How to think about the future part 2”, The Great Simplification podcast, episode 139, https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/139-how-to-think-about-the-future-part-2.
  15. Murphy, Thomas W, Jr, Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet, UC San Diego 2021. https://escholarship.org/uc/energy_ambitions
  16. https://unschoolers.org/what-is-unschooling/
  17. Ferguson, R.S., Lovell, S.T. Permaculture for agroecology: design, movement, practice, and worldview. A review. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 34, 251–274 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-013-0181-6

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The internet and computers are great. I love them and I want to share this digital world with my two kids. But it’s not all wonderful. Here are things I am trying to avoid with technology:

  • Ads
  • Tracking of my activity online
  • Click-bait
  • AI slop
  • App stores that 30% cuts or more of profits
  • Walled-gardens (for example Apple)
  • Not being able to own anything (digital rights management software allows Amazon to revoke access to books that were bought on the Kindle)
  • Apps that are designed to be addictive
  • Opaque recommender algorithms
  • Proprietary code and black box apps that make it difficult to learn how it works
  • Powerful platforms where regular people have little say
  • Banning and shadow-banning when people have different political views than ownership of platform
  • Secret business models (usually meaning start free and then enshittify later)

Things that I want more of with technology:

  • Consent
  • Privacy
  • Ownership of my data
  • Software where you are encouraged to learn how it works
  • Freedom to mess around with software and media and to share it with others
  • Software organizations built by and for the community
  • Open, sustainable business models
  • Community
  • Decentralization (no monopolies that can over power a market)

In 2025, these aspirations can seem like a pipe dream. But I’m optimistic that there is another way. At the very least, I can move in the direction of this dream even if I can not fully achieve it. My plan is to follow The Opt-Out Project’s guide which has a 21 day plan (LOL, it will take me much longer) to switch my whole digital life toward services that respect this dream.

This will not be easy. The guide shows how to completely get rid of Gmail, Google docs, and even Google Maps which are all services that I rely on heavily. It won’t just affect me too. It recommends switching away from Big Tech messaging apps like Whatsapp and from proprietary social networks such as LinkedIn as well. I will need to navigate how to distance myself from these exploitative services while hopefully finding ways to stay connected to my friends and family that still use them.

But I’m excited about this effort. I’ve already switched to an open source social network, Mastodon, which is part of a wider social network called the Fediverse. I love it! I find really interesting people, and I am encouraged by them. It’s nice to have more control over who shows up in my feeds, and feels more like how you meet people in real life. It’s more work, but has a chance for deeper connections. I’m expecting that as I transition more of my other services away from big, profit-seeking companies that I will learn a lot. I hope I will experience more freedom and connect with a positive community.

I plan on sharing my journey about it. So far I have finished Day 1 and Day 2. For Day 1, I bought an external hard-drive to save all the data that will potentially be on all my accounts on these Big Tech services. I got a 4 TB WD My Passport. Day 2 was more involved and was about moving away from Big Tech browsers and search engines to more open source and privacy protecting options. I already used Firefox, a popular open source browser, and DuckDuckGo, a privacy conscious search engine. But I wanted to diversify options since browsers and search engines are critical to accessing the internet. So here are the things I explored :

  • Firefox privacy improvements
  • Installed and tested additional search engines
    • StartPage, a private meta-search engine that uses Google results but protect your information from Google tracking
    • Quant, is a French search engine with its own search index
  • I installed and tested out a couple other browsers
    • The super private Tor browser following this guide (I installed it by downloading the Tor browser installation files as a tar file)
    • Vivaldi is an open source browser built on top of Chromium which is the foundation of the popular Chrome browser

They have been working fine so far. I’ve been using Quant as my main search engine on my desktop computer with no issues. I’ve used Vivaldi some and Tor occasionally and they both are fine too. I just switched my default search engine on mobile to Startpage so I will begin testing that out more too.

That’s it for now. I hope to work on Day 3 soon where I will take stock of all my digital accounts. Sounds like it will be a lot!

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In my last post Self-directed small groups for learning, I talked about wanting to start a group where we support each other with personal projects and learning. I reached out to some friends and acquaintances to see if people were interested. Some people are interested, and I had the first meeting with one other person this week. It’s exciting to get started! But many of the people I talked to had questions about this group idea. Here are some: what kind of projects? What is the topic or theme? Is it about accountability? Do you need to be a programmer/tech person to join? These questions helped to clarify what kind of group I’m hoping to form.

I am imagining a group where the members are connected by a desire and ability to support each other to make progress on their personal projects or learning endeavors. On the desire to help side, the members ideally will be curious about the other member’s project and be ready to hear about these projects, even if it is about topics that they are unfamiliar with. In my experience, just having the desire to help is usually enough because there are many ways to support that do not require specialized knowledge. Just listening and asking clarifying questions can be enough to help someone solve a problem (even a rubber duck can help!).

But there could be situations where there are barriers that prevent people from effectively supporting each other. With some projects people are essentially speaking different languages because the knowledge needed for a project is so specialized. Relatedly some members might be triggered by certain subject if they had a negative experience it (maybe a terrible physics class). Alternatively people might want to meet with people with similar experience and interests. In these cases, it probably would be better if people formed separate groups.

With that clarification of the kind of group I’m interested in, here are my responses to the questions:

  • What kind of projects?
    • Whatever you’re interested in! This group will be meeting remotely, so projects were you can make some progress while at a computer would probably be a better fit. But it doesn’t have to be all digital. For example you could document and publish your efforts to achieve new levels of physical fitness. For me, I’m going to be working on how to switch all of my software services to open source/privacy respecting services. I’m following The Opt-Out Project guide.
  • What is the topic or theme?
    • Ideally our efforts would help the community in some way. In my previous post, I mentioned a goal of “Adding to knowledge and culture through open source work that can be shared and modified by others”. Personally I’m interested in ways that people and communities can have more agency with the technology they use.
  • Is it about accountability?
    • Each person is driving their own project, so they don’t “need” to do anything. But it can be helpful for member’s to remind each other about their previously set goals. So yes it is about supporting each other as we each work toward our goals.
  • Do you need to be a programmer/tech person to join?
    • No. It would be good to have a project or something that you’re interested in, but it does not need to be about programming or tech. I am one of those science/tech people and my projects will mostly be in that realm, so if that doesn’t bother you then it will be fine.

I hope that helps clarify what I’m aiming for. If you’re interested reach out!

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Context: Crisis

Climate change, inequality, debt, geopolitical tensions. We as a society are in or nearing crisis on many levels. Now we are in what looks like a revolution here in the US, with the MAGA movement attempting to consolidate power. Some of us are hopeful this will lead to a more efficient government and a new era of prosperity for Americans. I for one am angry with the current situation, and given the magnitude of the April 5th protests1, I know many others are angry as well. Perhaps we can agree on the need for a new system, even if we can’t agree on what that system will look like. I believe new systems are forming now. We have the opportunity to contribute toward growing this new system.

I used the word grow and not build, because I think if we focus directly on building a new ideal system, then it is likely that we will fall back on ideas from the old system to make it more quickly. I’d rather for people to have autonomy to follow their interests, because this leads to genuinely new ideas. If this autonomy is also coupled with close social connections, then the learners can be supported and the needs of the group can be met. I came across these ideas through unschooling2, but I think they apply more generally. In my experience a good way to support self-directed learning and social connection is through small learning groups. Such groups can be a small step towards positive societal change.

Why small groups?

I have personal projects that I really want to do but struggle to find the time for. I do a good amount of reading, listening, and watching about my interests but a lot less of the doing than I would like. It’s somewhat surprising too because a lot of my interests involve computers so it’s not like I need to buy expensive equipment. In my core, I feel this need to learn, be creative, and to grow, so it feels like I’m withering when I’m not taking action. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one with this affliction. If we are not acting, then society is not benefiting from our creativity. What if we formed small groups to support each other in our learning and creative endeavors?

There is a dramatic difference between learning in a group and learning alone. When you’re alone you have limited feedback, and it is easy to get stuck. In a group, others will tell you if your plan doesn’t make sense, and if you get stuck they can help you think of other ideas. A group requires communication of ideas, and the process of formulating the ideas into words helps to solidify the concepts. In interacting with members of the group, you can observe what others are doing and ask if something is unclear which can lead to learning for both members. With these benefits, members of a group can gain skills that would be very difficult to gain alone.

I’ve been lucky to experience some of these benefits in a work team. I’m part of a software development team at my job at Spheryx. We do pair programming (often remotely) while working together on the code. It’s amazing how many questions come up. For example: “when should we break up a large function into smaller functions? What was that keyboard shortcut? Wait, that doesn’t make sense, how does that work?”. We each develop expertise in certain areas, but then teach each other the skills whether it is using a new library or a new programming practice. When we are planning our work, we will sometimes intentionally give a task to a person who has less experience in that area so they get a chance to learn. This group learning has helped me to go from a physicist who could write some scripts in Python to someone who can coordinate and contribute to large software projects.

But the incentives at work can be focused on results instead of on learning and creativity. In my experience learning really depends on having autonomy, having room to explore and try things. So I think it can be helpful to have learning groups outside of work (or at least outside a workplace where the management can define the priorities).

These kind of self-directed learning groups are fun! I was part of a small group of Code for Newark members who got together to learn javascript. It was great! We became friends and went on to work on other projects together and with other members of the organization. But these groups do not even have to be explicitly about “learning”. Some of my best experiences growing up were working together on projects with a couple of my good friends and my older brother. We made all sorts of stuff in our backyard: a push cart track with banked turns, a large jump for our bikes, a teepee big enough to stand in, and a working well. There is no way I would have done half those things if I was on my own. Why can’t we have some of that free exploration as adults?

Obstacles to small groups

Part of the challenge is many of us have been schooled. For all those years, our efforts were externally evaluated and graded. The teachers decided what was important to learn. The pattern continues in the workplace where the focus is on meeting externally chosen company goals. In all of it, there is a culture that we should be productive and not “waste time”. I want to break free from this mindset in order to experience fun, powerful learning.

I try to remind myself that when we freely choose what we learn, much of it will be practically useful. That’s part of the fun. It’s cool to make something that helps people. If we are drawn to work on something then we can put in immense effort and it won’t feel like “working”.

But even if we are open to the idea of directing our own learning, how will we have time? I know for myself with work, child care, and just daily life (laundry, groceries, cleaning…), I feel overwhelmed pretty often. It’s hard to imagine adding something else on top.

I think we can approach it in a similar way to exercise. We don’t have to train like we are in the Olympics. It can help to find exercises that are enjoyable and to do a little regularly. Usually it doesn’t end up costing as much time as expected because we no longer need as much time on other activities (for example winding down in the evening). So with the learning groups, we can find others in similar life situations and find an intensity that works for us. Something regular but maintainable.

Proposal for a small learning group

I am hoping to form or join a small learning group. Here is what I think could work for me in my current life situation. The format could be something like this:

  • A group of about 3 – 8 people
  • Group chat for random asynchronous communication (ideally allows for threaded conversation)
  • Daily or weekly messages briefly describing what you’ve done, what you intend to do next, and any challenges you are facing
  • Weekly or monthly audio/video call that could include
    • Quiet calls where all are working together on their own projects
    • Talking together about the projects/challenges the members are working on
    • Governance of the group through consent3
      • For example, defining a term for the group, that can be renewed if the group desires

I think it would be useful for the group to be clear on its goals. Here are ones that I am interested in:

  • Supporting each other with making progress on personal projects and learning
  • Helping members find careers that respect them as human beings and that benefit the wider community
  • Creating new organizations or businesses that contribute to the common good
  • Adding to knowledge and culture through open source work that can be shared and modified by others

Is this for you?

I’d love for others to join me in forming a group (or multiple groups). Here is how I pitch it:

  • Making progress on creative work helps the soul. You probably will be in a better place in your other relationships, which will make life run more smoothly.
  • Think of the groups as a self-directed graduate program/workshop. You won’t get a degree but you will learn and grow.
  • The group is a door, a beginning to a new chapter in your life.

It feels great to do something about the situation we are in. We can regain a sense of agency and find a sense of purpose.

This is an experiment. We can try it to see how it works. If you are interested, please reach out to me and hopefully we can start meeting soon.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_Off_protests ↩︎
  2. Unschooling is an alternative approach to education where children are allowed to pursue their own interests and adults support the children in this effort. See this article “What is Unschooling?” by Earl Stephens at https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/guest/earl_stevens.html ↩︎
  3. The principles from sociocracy could be helpful. Sociocracy is a governance system where decisions are made through consent and power is distributed through the organization. See this article https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/ ↩︎

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I recently started using overcoming isometric exercises, and I’m thoroughly enjoying them. These are exercises where you try to move an immovable object. Last month, I made this DIY isometric trainer setup by Reddit user 16of16 and have been practicing these kinds of exercises since then. It has opened up heavy resistance training for me which has seemed out of reach for the past decade.

I haven’t consistently lifted weights since grad school. When I lifted back then, I really enjoyed it. I liked feeling stronger, and I even enjoyed the actual lifting itself. It’s great to be able to give maximum power without breaking anything or hurting myself. But I stopped.

Weight lifting stopped being fun. After grad school, I didn’t have friends to go to the gym with. I like lifting free-weights, but without a gym buddy spotting me, I couldn’t safely give maximum effort. I tried using the machines, but that wasn’t as fun for me. Also I was commuting into NYC from New Jersey. As anyone who has done it knows, it can be soul-draining. It became very hard to justify regularly going to the gym.

I had another option, calisthenics. I had started doing push-ups as a kid which started me on a life-long practice of calisthenics. I love that I can do these exercises anywhere. I’ve learned a variety of different exercises at this point that I can do until the point of failure. So although I tend to do more reps than I would with weight lifting, I still can challenge myself and get stronger.

But I missed exerting maximum effort and being under a heavy load. Especially with free weights, the whole body becomes a force chain. Every part needs to contribute in order for the weight to be lifted. It is exhilarating.

Recently, I learned about overcoming isometrics which is allowing me to exert maximum force without weights. Isometrics are exercises where you exert force while not moving, for example wall sits. Overcoming isometrics is a variation where you push or pull against something strong that won’t move. It could be pushing against a wall or trying to lift a weight that is much heavier than you can lift. It’s cool because you can exert as much or as little force, for as long as you want. Despite nothing moving it is very much real force, and in a lifting position I feel the same kind of heavy load that I would with free weights.

To try out this kind of exerciese, I built the DIY isometric trainer setup from Reddit user 16of16. The idea is simple: a plywood board that you stand on, a strong bar that you hold, and a strong cargo strap looped under the board and hooked onto either end of the bar. The cargo strap is adjustable, so you can use this for various lifting positions. The exercise involves your feet/body pressing against the board and your hands/legs/back trying to push the bar away from the board. The cargo strap prevents it from moving and provides the resistance force.

Here’s how I made it:

  • I got the following items:
  • I filed the edge of the plywood to make it more rounded so that it doesn’t rip the cargo strap.
  • I removed the carabiners from the small cargo loops, and attached the loops through the circular end of the hooks at the end of the cargo strap.
  • To use it, I lay the cargo strap flat on the floor, lay the plywood on top, insert one of the bars through the loops at then end of the cargo strap, then adjust the length of the cargo strap as desired. Then I am ready to exercise.
Man standing on plywood board and holding a 1 inch diameter metal bar against his chest. The bar has cargo straps looped over the ends, and the cargo straps loop under the plywood board. The man seems to be straining upward against the bar with slightly bent knees. In the background a wood paneled wall and a few pieces of exercise equipment.
Me demonstrating my overcoming isometrics setup

With weights the visible aspect is the motion of the weights. With overcoming isometrics there isn’t much that is visible, although I do notice the strap going taut and the plywood flexing slightly. So I need to focus on what is happening internally: the compression I’m feeling and the effort of my muscles. But when I do that it works; I can challenge myself. I have a similar physical response that I would have after lifting a heavy weight: raised heart rate and faster breathing.

One of the reasons, I looked into isometrics in the first place is that I’ve heard they are good for joints. I struggle with runner’s knee. It tends to flare up if I do things like squats or jumps, and I can usually get better with physical therapy type exercises. So I hoped that overcoming isometrics would allow me to do heavy exercise. Alas my knee pain came back, so it is not a silver bullet. But it does seem to be easier on the body in some ways. I don’t get sore after these exercises.

My current plan is to do a mix of exercises, overcoming isometrics, calisthenics, and physical therapy exercises. Hopefully that will keep the aches and pains at bay. I also plan on periodically tracking the force that I can generate on the isometric setup. I use a crane scale to measure the force. I think it will be fun to see progress. I’m optimistic about it.

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We recently made significant progress helping our kids tidy their things. We have two boys 3 and 6 years old. The improved organization has been a relief for me because for a long time I have felt overwhelmed when I see all the toys, clothes, books, and little knickknacks in their room. To learn from the experience, I’m writing about what worked and what didn’t.

It is important to me to stay connected with my kids, and avoid actions that break the connection. My close relationship with the kids is key to supporting their needs. The associated love and closeness is a need itself, but the connection helps me to see and respond to my kid’s other needs. In my experience, pushing past the kids consent to do something “good” for the kids tends not to be worth it. The kids start to rebel, and then our routine starts to become a nightmarish ordeal. So I wanted to find a way to help the kids tidy their toys that they could consent to. A seemingly impossible task for kids who love toys!

But I felt it was important to do something because our kids needed help with organizing their things, especially with the toys. The main challenge was the sheer number of toys. Between Christmas, birthdays, relatives giving small things on random occasions, the kids using a small allowance to buy toys themselves, little gift bags from friends birthday parties, and toys in happy meals…it really added up. In addition, the toys span a wide range of sizes, shapes, materials, and colors. To make it even harder, many of the toys were part of a set, and if one tiny piece is missing it can ruin the whole set.

This kid’s strategy for organizing their items was to use every horizontal surface in their room as a heap. The advantage with this strategy is that the stuff you use tends to be on top, and there is more room to see a variety of items. Also you never have to worry about putting things “back”, you just put them down (a big plus for anyone, but especially a 3 year old!). The downside is that the sets of toys get completely mixed together so it is almost impossible to find all the pieces. Also it seems like the visual clutter makes it hard for the kids to find all the toys; they tend to play with a small subset. From my perspective, the heap strategy conflicted with my need for order and clear pathways in case of a fire.

To help the kids, I knew that I wanted to use principles from Marie Kondo’s work (see her book, the life-changing magic of tidying up), because it had made a big difference in my life. In 2019, I had gone through the whole Marie Kondo process, and it had really helped. It took me over a year but I finished in April, 2020. I wrote a post about that tidying experience. One of the things I learned was the importance of clearly defining where things will be stored.

That learning didn’t fully sink in, because when we moved into a house in 2021, I didn’t create a well defined storage system, and my things started to build up again. Also we had not yet gone through our jointly held stuff, and with a house we started to get more things. To reverse the trend, I started going through my things again, and after a few off and on attempts, I finished going through my own things this year. I haven’t finished with the storage systems yet. Writing about tidying has helped me remember how important storage is. So I just added a storage project to my to do list!

More than just “walking the walk” tidying my own things is preparing me to be able to help the kids as they go through their things. I don’t have everything figured out, but I’m learning, sometimes the hard way, about what works and what doesn’t. More importantly, I think tidying is building up my ability to hear my own inner voice and experience the joy of following it. I want to share this experience with my kids. I want them each to be free to follow their own inner voice.

I started actively working with the kids on tidying in August this year. I was home to watch the kids on the last week of August because they didn’t have daycare or school. We took a family vacation for the first half of the week, but in the second half I helped the kids go through their things. I did it in the morning before the kids had started watching shows, and each day only worked about an hour on it. That way the kids stayed fresh. We only did a little each day, but we kept on coming back to it and started to make some progress.

We went through things by category as recommended by Marie Kondo, starting with clothes. Despite toys being the more obvious source of clutter, it turned out that they both discarded a good amount of their clothes. So much so that it was a bit of a problem for my wife who wanted to make sure the kids have enough nice clothes. After discussion the kids kept some of the nice clothes and we kept some of our older son’s discarded clothes in storage for our younger son. We saw an immediate benefit from discarding clothes. It was a lot easier to help them get dressed in the morning. There were fewer options, and all the options were clothes the kids liked.

As we went through the decluttering process, it became important to clearly define which things and areas are managed by which people. Marie Kondo recommends that each person have a place for their things, and for them to be free to manage it how they like. I gained more clarity about this idea from sociocracy, which is a form of group organization where things are decided by consent. In sociocracy, there is this idea of domains which are areas in which a group or individual can do things without asking for permission. Domains are super helpful because they allow people to act and be creative within the domain without negatively affecting the larger group.

So I started thinking about how to apply domains to the kid’s room. Making sure there were clear paths in the room for fire safety is under the parents domain, but determining which regular clothes to keep is under the kids domain. The exact boundaries need to be negotiated. For example, at first I was thinking the choosing of the kid’s clothes could be under the kid’s domain, but we needed to make an exception for the parents to ensure there are some nice clothes for the kids. Similarly as we went through books, there were some children’s books that were old favorites of us parents, but that the kids were ready to discard. We decided to designate the bookshelf downstairs as under the parents domain, and we put those parent favorite, kid books downstairs. The kids could decide which books to keep in the shelf in their room.

The kids don’t have much paper yet, so we skipped it and went to toys. Although, we will need to come back to papers because my oldest is in 1st grade and starting to get lots of papers from school. We started with discarding the toys that didn’t spark joy. The “does this spark joy?” question can be a bit hard to understand for kids. I found that asking “Do you love this or do you think someone else would love this?” worked out pretty well. It seemed easier for the kids to part with toys if they thought that maybe another kid would take care of the toy. We put the toys they want to keep in a separate room to clearly separate them from the toys they hadn’t gone through yet.

After a couple Saturday mornings of going through toys, the kids lost energy in the discarding process. Most of the good toys were in the separate room. To shift things up, we applied domains. I got some large plastic bins and assigned 4 bins to each of my sons and put them in the kid’s room. Then we took the toys they had decided to keep and put them in the bins. These toy bins are under their domain. All the rest of the many miscellaneous toys we moved to the other room. The room is under the parent’s domain, but we hoped that the kids would still help go through the rest of the toys so the pile was under the shared domain of the parents and the kids. So now anything left in the pile needs the consent of the parents to keep, or the kids could move the items to their bins in their room. The shift in framing helped to give the kids another burst of energy to go through their toys.

As we went through the remaining toys we realized that many of them were part of sets and that it would be better for us parents to manage storing them. The toy sets are difficult to keep organized (especially for young children) and tend to be better as shared toys. Instead of each kid having their own small Duplo collection, it’s more fun to have one large set of blocks. Also practically it is much easier to put all the blocks of a certain kind together, instead of remembering which blocks belong to which kid. Thankfully the kids were open to this, so we put aside the toy sets they wanted to keep.

At this point the kids got tired of going through toys. The last bit my wife and I agreed to go through. It took us a while to find the time to go through the toys. We didn’t feel like we had the capacity to have more toys coming in until we had finished going through the current toys, so we stopped occasionally buying small toys for the kids on grocery store trips. This change motivated the kids, especially our older son, to persistently ask us to finish going through the toys. With that push, my wife and I were able to make some time to go through the toys. We decided what we were willing to store and bagged up the rest to be given away. In mid-November, we got a baby sitter to watch the kids while we went through the final things and set up storage for the toys.

The toys all have a spot now. There are shared sets of toys like hot wheels cars and tracks, dino figures, puzzles, and Magnatiles in the other room. Then in the kids room there are the favorite, random toys in their bins. There are still toys and various items scattered across the floor most days, but it is much more manageable to quickly put them away. That’s a win!

This organization effort definitely cost time and energy, but for us it was a good investment. We were already spending a good amount of effort clearing paths through piles of toys, so it made sense to spend effort now to get to a more sustainable situation. I’m glad that the kids were involved. I feel pretty confident there won’t be any big upset in the future about missing toys that we gave away. It was helpful using domains to clarify where stuff goes and who decides what. I’m hopeful that this perspective could help in other areas. Most importantly with things more organized, there is more room to play!

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The following post was written in early May 2020, but for some reason I never published it. I’m not sure why. I found it recently because I was trying to remember when I had gone through my Marie Kondo tidying challenge. I’m working on a followup post on tidying with kids, and I want to reference my original tidying challenge.

About a year and a month ago, I took on the challenge to tidy my possessions according to Marie Kondo’s KonMarie system. It’s been a marathon, but a great experience. I started at the end of March 2019, and called it done about two weeks ago [end of April 2020].

The idea is simple: go through all of my possessions and only keep the ones that “spark joy”. The challenge for me was my large numbers of possessions.

The KonMarie system breaks down the process into first discarding things that do not spark joy, and then finding ways to store all the things that do bring joy. Furthermore the discarding step is broken down by category: Clothes, Books, Paper, Komono (miscellaneous), and Sentimental.

This breaking down by category was critical for being able to get through this monumental task. Sometimes I would go for a few weeks without doing anything, but when I started again, I wouldn’t be starting from scratch. I would pick up at the category where I left off.

I finally finished the sentimental items around February or March, and so then I worked on storing things. I’ve found storage to be critical for two reasons: first good storage sparks joy and second good storage helps give natural feedback that helps to keep things tidy.

The joy of good storage surprised me. I had always thought of clothes drawers as utilitarian items. Discarding clothes didn’t change that, although it did help prevent that kind of guilty feeling of seeing clothes that I never wear. But following Marie Kondo’s advice, I rearranged the clothes first off by folding them vertically, then sorting by color, and using empty spaces to store things that go with clothes like hats, ties, and sunglasses. The end result is that I smile when I open my drawers.

I’ve found that good storage will naturally tell me when I need to do a bit of tidying. Marie Kondo recommends that you keep your storage areas about 90% full. So when I get a new shirt or a new book I can put it in the drawer or on the book shelf, but as the last 10% gets used up I can tell that I need to discard things that I no longer need. This has already happened with clothes and with books.

Working on storage was hard in a different way than discarding things. It requires creativity and sometimes materials like boxes. Also there is no clear definition of done. I ended up going with the it’s done if feels done to me. Essentially, I aimed for the areas where I store things to spark joy in some way and to look maintainable.

It’s not perfect for sure, but I’m happy about my stuff and how I’m storing it. I’m proud of that, and can say that I have finished.

Of course there is more to do. Maybe I’ll hang up some pictures or artwork. I’d love to go through my digital possessions and discard what doesn’t spark joy and find good ways to store what brings joy. Hopefully, we’ll go through our joint possessions as a family. We’ll take those things on at some point, but for now I’ll just celebrate this milestone.

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I installed the ActivityPub plugin and now people should be able to follow my website from the fediverse! I’m excited about it. I’ve been really enjoying Mastodon, but my website has really languished. I’m hoping that by adding it to the fediverse, I’ll be able to enjoy both. I also added the WordPress app to my phone, so maybe I will write short posts from time to time on the bus. We will see!

Here are a few notes about how I did it. I followed the guide about it on Fedi.tips. I also added a new user to my website so that it should show up on the fediverse as @david@davidbruffner.com. You should be able to search for that handle on whatever fediverse application you use, and then you can follow it and receive posts in your timeline if you like.

This is a test to make sure that everything works.

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It’s been a little over a year since my last post. Since you’re reading my personal blog you might be interested to know what I have been diving into in the meantime. Here’s a short list:

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning. I really think that AI systems need to be free to learn in order to become really useful. I was excited by Jeff Clune’s work on open-ended learning. I heard about his work through the TWIML podcast. Jeff Clune worked on this amazing project called POET where the AI system created obstacle courses and used them to train its parkour skills. I also got into Neural Operators which are a class of neural networks that map between functions instead of between vectors like normal neural nets. The sound like they are great for physics simulations.
  • Personal knowledge graphs. I switched from Evernote to Obsidian and Joplin. I adapted my task management workflow using this post, by Ruben Berenguel, as inspiration. There was a lot of fiddling and learning involved, but I like how all my notes are in markdown text files now. I feel more free.
  • Joined Mastodon social network. I’ve been really enjoying it. If you haven’t heard of it, it is a decentralized social network kind of like Twitter. It is part of the Fediverse which is a collection of different decentralized social networks that all interoperate together. Here’s my Mastodon profile, https://raphus.social/@davidruffner. Come check out the Fediverse!
  • Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). I did a deep dive into it. I learned a lot from the Libre Lounge podcast, hosted by Serge Wroclawski, and the FOSS and Crafts podcast, hosted by Morgan Lemmer-Webber and Christine Lemmer-Webber. I’ve been slowly transitioning my apps to open source alternatives.
  • I’ve been dabbling in the Elixir and Scheme programming languages. I took the Hands-On Guile Scheme for Beginners class and enjoyed it. I’m still looking to get better at the Actor Model, but have definitely gotten some exposure to functional programming.
  • I did a dive into Category Theory. I think someone shared about it on Mastodon, and I was blown away by this series of lectures by Bartosz Milewski.
  • I’m did a deep dive into Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication. It has helped me to grapple with what is going on between Israel and Gaza, and closer to home as helped with interpersonal conflicts. I’m taking the Bigbie Method intro course and enjoying it so far.
  • FOSS video games. I’ve been having a lot of fun finding free and open source video games to play myself and to share with my two sons (5 and 2). Here are some of the top games so far:
    • SuperTuxKart. We all love it! I got some xBox360 controllers so we can play on the computer as if it is a gaming console. It’s fun finding fan-made tracks and cars too.
    • Sonic Robo Blast 2 a fun retro 3D Sonic game.
    • 0 A.D. An excellent real time strategy game like Age of Empires

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Note: It’s been almost two years since my last post. We had a baby, and life has been more full with two little boys. It’s been lots of fun! But I kept coming back to this post, so eventually I was able to finish it. No guarantee on when the next post will be...

Recently, I have been really excited about the Free Will Theorem by John Conway and Simon Kochen. It states that if we have free will then elementary particles have some degree of free will too1. If you believe we can make free decisions, then this theorem has profound implications. In particular, it challenges that dichotomy between inanimate matter and us humans with our minds, emotions, and free will. Perhaps electrons and galaxies also have some degree of internal life?

But first do we have free will? I believe we do have a limited ability to choose between different options and that our decisions have the potential to change the course of the unfolding universe. But this feels like a religious belief, because I can’t prove it. When I look at the laws of physics, things look to be deterministic or to be driven by randomness. Fundamentally, I’m a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons that obey the laws of physics, so how does my free will fit into this picture if it exists at all?

These questions about free will are core to the mind-body problem. One way to state the problem is, since we are matter where does our subjective inner life come from? I want to write about some of my grappling with the mind-body problem, and about how the Free Will Theorem helps.

Wondering about the mind body problem

I’ve struggled with what you could call the mind-body problem since I was a young. I remember feeling uncomfortable when people described the human brain as “just a bag of chemicals”. It didn’t make sense to me. How could a bag of chemicals learn, make decisions, and love? But we are are made from matter, so I was left with an unsettled feeling, that maybe I was wrong. In college, I considered the idea that maybe inner life doesn’t exist at all. I didn’t know it at the time but this is called eliminative materialism2. To me that is an incredibly dark idea. Fascinating that you could have a whole universe without any awareness, but also deeply lonely and disturbing. But I could not accept this idea because it would mean denying my own inner life.

I also considered the idea that perhaps I am the only one that experiences inner life. What if the people I’m talking to are just responding according to the electrical signals in their brain that have been trained by their experiences and by evolution? What if they have no subjective experience? Perhaps them talking about it is just a quirk of evolution like peacock tails. I also didn’t know this at the time but this describes solipsism3. It didn’t make sense to me because I’m probably not that special, so most likely other people have an inner life as well.

After graduate school, I entered a period of questioning the foundations of my Catholic faith, and in the process learned about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He writes in “The Phenomenon of Man” about his theory that all things have a inner subjective experience4. I found this idea to be profound. I had already believed that animals have some type of consciousness, but now I was invited to consider even electrons to have some small amount of inner life. Teilhard’s view of the world and the mind is a form of panpsychism, specifically panexperientialism5. This idea suggests that all matter has some degree of mentality from humans down to electrons.

But say we and everything else in the universe has this inner experience, does it matter? Do our thoughts change anything or are they fully determined by our evolving physical configuration? Is free will an illusion? I am definitely biased is this area. I can’t shake the idea that our choices matter, that we are not entirely determined by our past. I do admit that I am heavily influenced by my environment, but still I believe that at least in a small way I can choose between different paths.

With these types of questions there are no easy answers, but the Free Will Theorem gives a useful perspective. It describes free will as the ability to take an action that can not be predicted by any previous information in the universe. If this type of free will exists then it can change the course of the universe; the story is still being written.

The Free Will Theorem

John Conway and Simon Kochen are both mathematicians but their Free Will Theorem has implications in physics and philosopy. Conway gave a series of lectures about this theorem, and acknowledged that you have to be a little crazy to make a big statement outside your field6. But they had something important to say.

The setup

To make their proof, they imagined a situation where two spin-1 particles (for example certain atoms) are first “twinned” or entangled (in a singleton state) and then one of them is moved to Mars while the other remains on Earth. There is an experimenter A on Earth and an experimenter B on Mars and each experimenter can measure the spin of their respective particle. If they measure the squared component of the spin along a certain direction, then they will get a 1 or a 0. It turns out that for spin 1 particles, if one experimenter measures the spin in three orthogonal directions then result will be two 1’s and one 0 in some order. This is derivable from quantum mechanics (I don’t know how!), but they take it as an axiom which they call the SPIN axiom.

The second key piece of the experiment is that the particles are entangled. Even though one particle is on Earth and the other is on Mars, when each experimenter measures the spin in the same direction they will measure the same value for the spin. This a strange effect. We don’t see this type of behavior in daily life, but it is what we observe experimentally for entangled electrons and other very small particles in entangled states. Conway and Kochen call this effect the TWIN axiom.

The final setup for the theorem is the limit on the speed that information can travel between the two experimenters. From relativity theory, we know that no signals carrying information can travel faster than the speed of light. Since the experimenters are so far apart this means that each has time to perform an experiment before the other can influence it by sending a signal. They call this the FIN axiom. With these three axioms they derive the following theorem.

The theorem

This paper has set up a situation that relates the experimenter’s choice of measurement direction to the response of the particles. The theorem shows that if the experimenters can freely choose the direction to measure a particle then the particle’s response is free in the same way. This is a strange, but intriguing idea. Here is how they state the theorem:

The Free Will Theorem (assuming SPIN, TWIN, and FIN)].

If the choice of directions in which to perform spin 1 experiments is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then the responses of the particles are equally not functions of the information accessible to them.

John Conway and Simon Kochen

The measured spin does not exist before the measurement

We are used to properties existing before you measure them. For instance, we don’t expect that measuring a box will change its dimensions. But small particles in the quantum regime are different. They can be in a state where the measurement outcome is random. It turns out for this specific example of spin 1 particles, you can prove that the measured spin does not exist before the measurement. If it did then there would be a deterministic function that gives the spin based on the direction of measurement. Such a function, called a 101-function, does not exist. The proof is call the Kochen-Specker paradox and depends on a geometric puzzle with no solution7. That’s good, because if the measured value already existed then the particles would definitely not have any choice in how they responded to the measurement.

Breaking down the proof

Not only does the measured spin not exist until the experiment, the Free Will Theorem proves that it can’t be predicted. The proof works by contradiction. First it assumes the opposite, that it is possible to predict the measured spin of the particle from information available to the particle. After a series of deductions John Conway and Simon Kochen find a contradiction. If the opposite of the Free Will Theorem is false, then the Free Will Theorem is true.

So how do they find the contradiction? Here are the steps they follow:

  1. First they assume that there actually are functions that could predict the responses of the particles given any information available to the particle before the direction of measurement was chosen by the experimenter.
  2. Then they use the TWIN axiom, that the particles are entangled, to show that the function for particle a is equal to the function for particle b if the measurement directions match.
  3. Next they note that the information available to particle a before the measurement does not include the direction of the measurement of particle b, because according to relativity there are some frames of reference where particle b is measured before particle a. This allows them to define a function that returns the measured spin values using only the measurement directions as input.
  4. Finally they observe that this new function is a 101-function, but such a function does not exist. So by contradiction they prove the Free Will Theorem

I keep having to re-read the theorem to follow through the logic, but each time it makes sense. If you’re interested, I definitely recommend you read it yourself. As far as mathematical papers, it is relatively accessible.

Implications of the Free Will Theorem

At the low level, the Free Will Theorem is just talking about whether it is possible to predict the outcome of a particular experiment, but the conclusion has deep implications. If the experimenters could pick the directions for the experiment then the particles could pick their response. How can particles pick a response? Do they have some degree of consciousness? It strange to think about everything in the universe having some small amount of inner life, but if it is true then it points to where our own free will comes from. Perhaps the free choices of the particles that make us up don’t completely cancel out, which would leave us with some ability to make free choices ourselves. In their philisophical remarks, John Conway and Simon Cochen write:

The authors strongly believe, however, that there is a way our brains prevent some of this cancellation, so allowing us to integrate what remains and producing our own free will

John Conway and Simon Cochen

It is not clear at all how that emergence of our free will comes from the free wills of our constituent particles. But it makes a lot of sense to me. From this perspective, there is no need for a magical life force that animates the body. Matter itself is animated and has some limited ability to determine its own destiny.

Of course, there is no requirement to believe in free will for people or for sub-atomic particles. The Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is a deterministic interpretation that is gaining popularity8. The idea is that the wavefunction of the universe is what is ultimately real. It evolves deterministically, but contains projections that correspond to different versions of reality. Each projection is a parallel world. Every time there is what appears to be a free choice of a particle or a person, the world divides with one world for each possible outcome. There is a certain beauty to this theory because everything can be explained mathematically, in principle.

I find this Many Worlds interpretation to be unsatisfying, because I have such difficulty letting go of the idea that I can make choices and that they could make a difference. But I want my beliefs to match reality as much as possible. The Free Will theorem provides a coherent picture of how free will works if it exists. I find it to be an expansive and exciting view of the world. I like how John Conway and Simon Cochen end their paper:

Einstein could not bring himself to believe that “God plays dice with the world,” but perhaps we could reconcile him to the idea that “God lets the world run free.”

John Conway and Simon Cochen

A world where all the protons and electrons are running free sounds great to me. I hope it’s true. Until I find evidence that disproves it, I’ll take it as an article of faith,

  1. Conway, John and Kochen, Simon. “The Free Will Theorem”. URL=Arxiv.orghttps://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079v1
  2. Ramsey, William, “Eliminative Materialism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/materialism-eliminative/
  3. Stephen P. Thornton. “Solipsism and the Problem of Other Minds”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL=https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/#H1 accessed 12/30/2022.
  4. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p56-57
  5. Kind, Amy. “Panexperientialism, Cognition, and the Nature of Experience”, Psyche 2006: VOLUME 12 ISSUE 5. URL=http://journalpsyche.org/files/0xab06.pdf2021-05-27 09:05 Panpsychism
  6. Conway, John. “Free Will and Determinism in Science and Philosophy”, lecture series, URL=https://mediacentral.princeton.edu/media/Free+Will+and+Determinism+in+Science+and+Philosophy/1_h7r12hbc
  7. Kochen, S., Specker, E., J. of Math. and Mech. 17 (1967), 59–87. URL=http://www.iumj.indiana.edu/IUMJ/fulltext.php?artid=17004&year=1968&volume=17
  8. Sean Carroll. “Reality as a Vector in Hilbert Space”, 2021. URL=https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.09780