Agency (Part 4 of 8)

From the Mechanism to the Mystery

Article on Quantum Teleportation (circa 1997)

If this is your first time here, I’d recommend starting from the beginning. You’re landing in the middle of a long conversation, and this part is the longest so far (buckle up!). This conversation began with the rise of artificial intelligence and turned quickly toward something more personal: our own sense of agency. What it is. What threatens it. And whether anything remains when it feels like it’s slipping away.

In the last part, we followed the logic of determinism to its endpoint: if everything is caused, then nothing is chosen. If the past dictates the future, then we’re not really steering. We’re just watching ourselves move through pre-drawn lines. And if that’s true, then the belief in agency collapses. So does effort. And eventually, so does meaning.

But what if determinism is working with an incomplete model? While we can’t dismiss it as wrong, perhaps it’s only part of the story. This is where the frame begins to bend, and things get even more interesting.

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The Machine View of the Universe

During the Scientific Revolution, thinkers like Newton, Descartes, and Galileo gave us new tools to understand the physical world – and those tools came with metaphors. For much of the last few centuries, the dominant metaphor for the universe has been a machine. Things like the body became less of a mystery, and more like a mechanism with muscles and molecules instead of moods and meaning. And the mind too, could be studied like a machine: with inputs, outputs, components, and wiring.

This perspective brought extraordinary advances. The precision of Newtonian physics made prediction possible. It gave us technology, medicine, spaceflight, and the seeds of modern computing. But it also did something subtler. It reshaped the way we imagine reality itself. If the universe is a machine, then everything must operate according to fixed principles. Every cause leads to an effect. Every part has a function. Given full knowledge of the system, the future becomes calculable.

In some ways, this metaphor makes sense. It isn’t meaningless. It’s just incomplete. Because a machine can only do what it’s built to do. And many of us, whether we admit it or not, have started to wonder if that’s all we are.

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Uncertainty and the Collapse of Prediction

But if the universe isn’t like a machine, then what is it? This question brings us to one of my favorite corners of science: quantum mechanics. While I’m not a physicist, I have a deep admiration for those that are, and I take the discipline seriously. It’s a topic that I have been following for over thirty years as an interested amateur, with a healthy respect for both its complexity and its limits. Unfortunately, when quantum mechanics is paired with topics like agency or consciousness in public discourse, it’s often accompanied by hype and shallow treatment. I do my best to avoid that type of rhetoric. Instead, I think it’s important to simply show how quantum theory expands our perspective beyond Newtonian physics, and why that’s important to this topic of agency.

This essay won’t be an exhaustive tour (that would take volumes; it’s long enough as it is). What follows here is more like a guided distillation. I will walk through a few of the discoveries that I think matter most, especially as we attempt to see beyond a deterministic universe.

Before we dive in though, I will make a prediction. As you read this, one of two things might happen: either your eyes will glaze over or, like me, you’ll be on the edge of your seat. If you fall into the latter category and this section piques your interest, I recommend going deeper by reading almost anything by Sean Carroll.

But for now, let’s go back to where quantum theory began: with light.

In 1801, Thomas Young performed what became known as the double-slit experiment. He passed a beam of light through two thin slits and projected it onto a screen. Instead of forming two bright lines (what you’d expect if light were made of particles), it created an interference pattern, like ripples in a pond. This was proof that light behaves as a wave.

That experiment held sway for over a century. Light was a wave. That was that. Until it wasn’t.

In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that light could also behave as a particle. Specifically, as discrete packets of energy he called quanta, or, later known as photons. These particles could knock electrons loose in the photoelectric effect. This was something wave theory couldn’t explain. Suddenly, light wasn’t a wave or a particle. It was somehow both, depending on how it was measured.

This became known as wave-particle duality, and the implications didn’t stop at light. In the 1920s, physicists like Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and Clinton Davisson began extending these ideas to matter. They showed that electrons, which were supposed to be particles, could also exhibit wave-like behavior. This means that if matter can behave differently depending on how it is measured, then predictability breaks down.

This led to one of the most groundbreaking realizations in science: particles don’t exist in fixed states until they’re measured.

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg formalized this with his uncertainty principle, which states that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa. This wasn’t a limitation of the instruments. It was a limit built into the structure of quantum mechanics. Particles simply don’t have definite properties until they are measured.

The next year, in 1928, Erwin Schrödinger introduced what may be the most famous metaphor in all of physics: the cat in a box. But don’t worry: this wasn’t a real cat. There was no physical experiment. It was a thought experiment meant to illustrate how strange quantum theory had become. In his setup, a cat is placed in a box with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter triggers and the cat dies. If it doesn’t, the cat lives. But until the box is opened and observed, quantum theory suggests that the cat is not alive or dead – it is in a state of superposition, both alive and dead at once.

Sound absurd? Quite! But the point was to highlight how absurd it was. However, in doing so, it also revealed something important: the act of observation appears to play a role in resolving the system. Now this is where we need to be a little careful not to slip from science into pseudo-science. Sean Carroll and other physicists have made the point that observation, in this context, does not require consciousness or a living observer. For example, if an atomic nucleus decays, and then it interacts with its environment, that can be a quantum measurement – even if no living being was ever aware that it happened. What this does tell us, however, is that at the foundational level, reality is not fixed. It’s responsive.

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Quantum Entanglement and Many Worlds

Then, in 1935, the frame bends a little further. Einstein, along with Podolsky and Rosen, published a thought experiment known as the EPR paradox. It was designed to expose what they saw as a flaw in quantum mechanics: something that later became known as quantum entanglement. If two particles were “entangled,” they could no longer be described independently, even when the particles appeared to be separated by distance. In other words, regardless of how far apart these particles were, once one particle was measured, the result of measuring the position of the second particle could be predicted accurately. Einstein dismissed this as “spooky action at a distance.” It violated Einstein’s core belief that information couldn’t travel faster than the speed of light, and that all causes must be local.

But, decades later, experimentalist began to test these predictions directly. And to their astonishment, entanglement held. It was real.

I remember reading a newspaper headline in 1997 about this phenomenon. The article described a team of Austrian physicists who had achieved quantum teleportation with photons of light. The lead scientist was Anton Zeilinger, and I was so intrigued I cut the article out and kept it (pictured at the top of this essay). It was the first time that I remember feeling that the future was full of possibility, and we were not locked into a deterministic lens of the universe.

Zeilinger, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2022, had laid the foundation for quantum information theory, now a cornerstone of quantum computing and cryptography. His experiments showed that particles could be entangled across distance, and that at the quantum level, information played a much more fundamental role than energy or matter.

But entanglement wasn’t the end of the mystery. It was just the beginning.

Going back to the 1920s, physicists were still grappling with the strange paradox of wave-particle duality. This puzzle sparked intense debates among many physicists, including Bohr and Heisenberg. Over time, a set of shared views coalesced into what became known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to this framework, quantum systems exist in a probabilistic superposition of indeterminate states until an observation is made. At that point the wave function “collapses” into a single outcome. Many physicists, including Einstein, were never fully satisfied with this interpretation.

Later, in 1957, Hugh Everett proposed the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, offering a way to explain measurement without the controversial idea that observation causes the wave function to “collapse” into a single outcome. His idea was simple but staggering: when a quantum event “resolves” (or “decoheres,” in quantum terms), it doesn’t collapse into one outcome. Instead, it branches into all possible outcomes, each in a separate but equally real universe. Every time a particle is observed or entangles with the world around it, it’s not collapsing into a single possibility. We are simply becoming entangled with one version of it, while the others unfold elsewhere.

It might sound like science fiction, but it’s a serious interpretation, taken up by a number of modern physicists, including Sean Carroll. He argues that the Many Worlds framework may be the cleanest and most consistent reading of quantum math. In fact, it’s being actively debated. In late 2024, Google’s new quantum chip, Willow, sparked renewed interest when researchers claimed that it showed behaviors consistent with Many Worlds predictions.

The scientific community still hasn’t reached a consensus. However, one thing is clear: our models of reality seem to show that some things are not as certain as they seem. The universe, at the quantum level, appears to be open, probabilistic, and participatory.

This doesn’t disprove deterministic cause and effect. But it does displace it as the only explanation. It shows us that the universe is unlikely to be a completely locked system. While there are still many real constraints, it is also a field of unfolding possibility. And in a universe like this, possibility is no longer just poetic. It’s built into the math.

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Complexity and Emergence

But, hold on a minute…

Even if we accept that quantum physics displaces the strict determinism of Newtonian mechanics, that doesn’t immediately rescue agency. The roll of a die is random, but it isn’t a choice. Possibility alone is not the same as participation. So where, if anywhere, does agency come in?

One promising idea is emergence: the phenomenon where new properties or behaviors arise in complex systems that aren't obvious, or even accessible, from their individual parts.

Physicist Sean Carroll, in a 2024 paper titled What Emergence Can Possibly Mean, helps clarify what’s often a foggy concept. He defines it as a structured relationship between levels: a higher-level theory that can model and predict behavior even when most of the micro-level information is ignored. This means that some macroscopic patterns can exist, even if they aren’t strictly deducible from the underlying components.

Take something like temperature, for example. An atom doesn’t have “temperature.” Neither does a molecule. But a million of them in motion? Suddenly you can measure heat. The same is true for wetness, friction, and turbulence. But it’s not magic. It’s structure. Organization. Scale.

As for whether or not this same theory can be used to explain consciousness is still being debated. Some philosophers, such as David Chalmers, favor emergence as an explanation for the existence of consciousness. However, Carroll is quick to point out that in order “to believe that consciousness is strongly emergent would require that the predictions of [Quantum Field Theory], for example for the behavior of electrons, are incorrect when applied to a situation like a human brain.” While this might be conceivable, it hasn’t convinced many physicists.

Even if we did accept that consciousness was emergent from the brain, we would never isolate a single “agency module.” Instead, we might consider how agency could arise as an emergent structure shaped by interaction, memory, context, and feedback. If so, it could give us a sense of what agency feels like: those moments when we don’t simply react, but pause, evaluate, and reflect. This capacity wouldn’t be arising from randomness or pure control, but from our ability to hold competing possibilities in tension. That space of internal negotiation is where something like agency might become possible.

Not guaranteed. Not unlimited. But possible.

That doesn’t mean the brain is a free agent in a vacuum. Much of what it does is automatic: breathing, filtering, predicting, remembering – and much of it runs below awareness altogether.

But within that dense system, behind all the noise, and under certain conditions, we might observe something that seems a lot like… volition. A hesitation before habit. A deliberate pause. A deviation from our usual pattern.

Still, emergence applied to the idea of consciousness is not considered a proven theory. Nor, even if it could be proven, would it hand us free will on a silver platter. Instead, it simply opens the door to consider more than strict deterministic principles.

And this is important.

Because if emergence (or something like it) is possible, then while causality still matters – so does coherence, attention, awareness, discernment, and presence. And perhaps leaves the door open just enough for something like agency.

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A Universe in Process

Now, before we can make our way out of this materialist rabbit hole (yes, that is where we are headed), we need to go a little deeper.

If emergence claims that complexity can’t be fully explained by its parts, then process philosophy takes it one step further. It suggests that there are no independent parts to begin with. According to this world view, everything that exists is shaped by its relationships. In other words, everything is in process.

And while this idea might seem new, it has deep roots in both science and philosophy. One of the clearest articulations in modern physics came from John Wheeler, a theoretical physicist who worked closely with Einstein and helped develop the theory of nuclear fission. But later in his career, Wheeler turned his attention to something more fundamental: the question of observation itself.

Wheeler proposed what he called a “participatory universe.” His idea was that the universe doesn’t simply exist in a fixed, objective state, waiting to be discovered. Instead, it comes into being through a series of interactions: questions asked, measurements made, choices observed. For Wheeler, information was more fundamental than matter. The universe, he argued, is composed of binary decisions, something often referenced as “it from bit.” Simply put, reality co-arises with those who engage with it. To be clear, Wheeler did not identify his theories with process philosophy directly; however, many have interpreted his findings as support for this world view.

More commonly referenced in the realm of process philosophy is Alfred North Whitehead, an early 20th-century philosopher and mathematician. Early in his career, Whitehead co-authored the three-volume Principia Mathematica, with his former student Bertrand Russell (a work that is still considered one of the most important contributions to mathematical logic).

A decade later, Whitehead sought to reimagine the very nature of being, in what he called “philosophy of organism,” but later became more widely known as process philosophy. He rejected the classical idea that reality is made up of substances that exist completely independent from one another. Instead, he claimed that the fundamental units of reality are events. In this view, the universe is more like a continuous flow of becoming, something he called “creative advance.” In other words, a relational unfolding; an improvisation within constraints.

This idea, that reality is fundamentally experiential rather than merely material, finds a striking resonance in modern philosophy of mind. In 1994, David Chalmers, who we referenced earlier, famously named what he called the “hard problem of consciousness”: the puzzle of how subjective experience arises from physical processes. In other words: why does any of this experience feel like something? Why does the firing of neurons produce a felt sense of awareness, rather than just behavior? Science can describe the processing of information, but it struggles to explain why those processes are accompanied by an inner life.

By sharpening the question, Chalmers, reintroduced a mystery that analytic philosophy had spent decades trying to dissolve: the mystery of subjectivity – the idea that experience may not be reducible to structure alone.

Which brings us, in an unexpected way, to Dōgen. Across the world and centuries earlier, the Japanese Zen master Eihei Dōgen was saying something uncannily similar. In his 13th-century text Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen introduced the concept of “uji,” or being-time. To Dōgen, time was not a linear container in which events occurred. Time was the events themselves, each moment fully expressing itself as a manifestation of being.

Centuries later, Heidegger, writing in Being and Time, echoed Dōgen’s uji by asking: “Why do we say that time passes away, when we do not say with just as much emphasis that it arises?” In this view, agency is not about controlling time or escaping cause. It is about fully inhabiting this very moment.

Wheeler. Whitehead. Chalmers. Dōgen. Heidegger. Five very different minds, from different centuries and traditions. But they arrive at a similar insight: the belief that the universe is not a mechanism unfolding in isolation. It’s a field of participation, and we are part of the unfolding. And in this frame, agency is the capacity to respond, to co-shape, to bring awareness to the relational dance we’re already part of.

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Why This Changes the Story

If you’ve followed along this far, wow! Thank you.

While we haven’t covered every detail, we’ve made it through a highlight of the materialist lens of the universe. After recovering from the deterministic perspective of Newtonian physics in the last part of this essay, we’ve now gone through a bit quantum theory, a pinch of emergence, and a cursory overview of process philosophy. We’ve covered a lot of this materialist viewpoint.

Also, you might be wondering: Okay, but what does any of this latest science and philosophy actually change?

It changes the frame.

Determinism rests on a picture of the universe as a closed system. A machine, however vast, that unfolds according to fixed laws. The more you know about the parts, the more you can predict about the whole. In that frame, freedom is an illusion. Consciousness is a byproduct. Meaning is post hoc. And agency? Meh… that’s just a story neurons tell themselves to feel less alone.

But if the universe is not a machine… if, instead, it's emergent, probabilistic, relational, or at least unfinished… well, then the story changes. We are no longer gears in a mechanism. We are participants in a dance.

Causality still exists. So do constraints. Sorry to break it to you, but that’s real, and it’s not going away. But it’s not the whole picture. There’s also uncertainty, novelty, interaction, scale, context – each of which shapes what is possible.

This is the deeper consequence of emergence, quantum behavior, and process thinking. It invites us to move from asking what causes what to asking what relationships make something real? From what's predictable? to what’s possible?

And if the universe is structured for possibility (even within constraints) – then agency is not absurd. It’s not even unlikely. It’s just small, subtle, and situated.

And while it doesn’t represent freedom from cause, it does provide freedom within relationship. This shift, from domination to participation, requires something more than theory. It requires presence. It requires curiosity. It requires care. And maybe, it even requires an appreciation of beauty.

Because if the universe is not a solved equation but an unfolding story, then wonder is not weakness. It’s a form of alignment. It’s a way of remembering that not all meaning can be extracted. Some of it must be felt. Just as the taste of chocolate can only be fully understood by experiencing it directly, words, symbols, and equations can only take us so far. Romanticism saw this long before physics did. The poets reminded us that beauty is not a distraction from the truth. It’s what truth feels like when it opens beyond comprehension. It’s what calls us back to the mystery, to live inside it more fully.

And this, for me, is the point.

Because to live inside the mystery, we have to meet it – with presence, humility, discernment, and the courage to help shape what comes next.

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So What Now?

If the deterministic model was only ever part of the story, and if quantum physics, emergence, and process thought have expanded the frame, then what does that mean for agency? And I don’t mean the kind of agency that exists only in theory, but the kind that can be felt. The kind that can be experienced. The kind that we can pay attention to in this very moment, and in our daily lives. In the pause before reaction. In the gap between impulse and response. In the moment when we notice something… and then decide if we want to do something different.

If the universe is relational, emergent, or unfinished, then maybe our agency arises from it. Maybe it lives in attention. And perhaps, that’s something we can practice. And when we do practice it, what do we notice? This is something that ancient Eastern practices, such as Buddhism, have been exploring for thousands of years, and they offer a helpful lens when exploring what the felt sense of agency might be like.

So that’s where the rest of this journey will take us: What happens when we pay attention to our agency in the moments when we can feel it most directly? Where might agency really be found when we do that? And assuming it does exist, even in the smallest degree, how do we begin to cultivate it, protect it, and use it wisely?

… More on the second half of this journey next time.

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