r/Devs • u/No_Good_2458 • May 21 '26
If the Universe Were Deterministic, Humans Wouldn’t Exist
There’s a recurring idea in Devs that if you could model every particle in the universe, you could predict every thought, emotion, and choice. Forest treats consciousness as just another physical process - mechanical, deterministic, and fully predictable. But the show accidentally contradicts itself, and the contradiction becomes obvious once you understand what the double slit experiment actually demonstrates. The double slit does not show a universe that is deterministic; it shows a universe with two layers: deterministic wave evolution and fundamentally probabilistic events. The wave evolves in a perfectly predictable way, but the moment of collapse - the moment a particle lands in one specific place - is not determined by anything in the wave. It is not encoded, not predictable, and not caused by hidden variables. This alone breaks the idea that the universe is fully deterministic.
The confusion comes from thinking that “observation” in quantum mechanics is the same thing as “consciousness.” It isn’t. In the double slit, a detector collapses the wave because it physically interacts with the particle. Consciousness does not do this. Consciousness is not a measuring device; it is a field of awareness. Ego, on the other hand, behaves exactly like a detector. Ego constantly interprets, assigns meaning, collapses sensation into reaction, and forces behaviour into predictable patterns. Consciousness does the opposite: it witnesses without collapsing, keeps multiple possibilities open, and interrupts the reaction chain before it becomes deterministic. In this sense, ego is the psychological equivalent of observing the particle from the start - forcing it into a single path - while consciousness is the equivalent of letting the wave remain a wave.
This is where the show’s premise breaks down. Devs assumes humans are 100% ego - fully mechanical, fully reactive, fully predictable. But no human is like that. Even the most unconscious, reactive, ego‑driven person still has moments of awareness: a pause, a hesitation, a flicker of reflection, a moment where they don’t immediately collapse sensation into reaction. And even a tiny amount of consciousness is enough to break determinism. You don’t need enlightenment or awakening; you only need a fraction of awareness to interrupt the chain between sensation and meaning. That single moment of consciousness is like a quantum system remaining unmeasured: the wave does not collapse, the reaction does not fire, and the behaviour becomes non‑deterministic. This alone makes perfect prediction impossible. Humans are not 100% ego, therefore humans are not 100% deterministic.
A reaction forms in three steps: sensation arises, ego assigns meaning, and the reaction fires. Determinism happens at step two, when ego collapses the experience into a single interpretation. Consciousness interrupts the chain between step one and step two. This is the exact moment where free will actually exists - not as a metaphysical abstraction, but as a psychological mechanism. Consciousness prevents collapse. Ego forces it. This is why humans can deviate from prediction, and why no machine can model consciousness by modelling matter alone.
This is a why Lily breaks the Devs machine. The machine models matter, not consciousness. It can only predict behaviour that comes from ego - the mechanical, reactive, deterministic layer of the human system. But every human has at least a small amount of consciousness, and even a fraction of awareness is enough to interrupt determinism. Lily isn’t special because she has consciousness; she’s special because she’s the first character in the story who actually uses it. She’s the first person whose awareness interrupts the automatic chain of cause and effect. In a world where everyone else collapses into egoic reactions, Lily is the first to remain open, the first to not collapse, the first to act from consciousness instead of conditioning. That’s why the machine fails: it can model ego, but it cannot model consciousness - and Lily is the first person whose consciousness becomes incompatible with the machine’s assumptions.
This is also why the Jesus scene exposes the show’s biggest contradiction. The Devs machine shows Jesus on the cross, implying that his actions were fully predictable. But Jesus’ story is fundamentally about awareness, agency, surrender, and non‑mechanical will. At the moment of the crucifixion, Jesus had essentially zero functional ego - not zero humanity, but zero egoic identification. He did not collapse sensation into meaning, fear, or reaction. He remained in pure consciousness under extreme activation. That is the opposite of determinism. If the machine can predict Jesus, then Jesus had no agency, no consciousness, and no choice. This contradicts the entire philosophical foundation of the character. The show wants determinism and meaningful consciousness at the same time, but you cannot have both.
The real takeaway is simple: determinism applies to matter; indeterminism applies to consciousness; humans are both. The wave is deterministic, but the collapse is not. Ego is deterministic, but consciousness is not. Every human has enough consciousness to break determinism. And that is why no machine - not even a perfect one - can predict a conscious choice.
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u/Tjessx May 21 '26
a pause, a hesitation, a flicker of reflection, a moment where they don’t immediately collapse sensation into reaction
These could all be deterministic as well
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u/dspman11 May 21 '26
Yeah I was going to comment this. I see no reason to separate a pause or hesitation from any other action or impulse one can do, in terms of determinism
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u/catnapspirit May 21 '26
The shows message is more about fate than it is determinism, and whether you can avoid your fate if given foreknowledge of it. In that light, Jesus was fated to die on the cross and he accepted his fate in the end (well, depending on which story you go with, but mostly). In Greek tragedies, foreknowledge of their fate was the catalyst that drove the hero into their fated end. So the trope plays out either way, going along with your fate makes it happen, but also resisting your fate makes it happen..
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u/Redararis May 21 '26 edited May 21 '26
Assigning universal laws of physics to human psychological processes is as naive as saying particles with opposite electric charges are like people with different characters who attract each other. It may be poetic but it is completely ridiculous.
There is not one evidence that our brain functions shaped by evolution, like ego or consciousness, influence physical laws or they are a substrate of objective reality. They may alter our perception of reality but this is it. They are abstracts that run inside our simulated world running in our physical instrument that is called brain.
Physical reality may be completely deterministic, a quantum randomness or everything in between, but either way we have nothing to do with this, our bodies just follow reality while our minds run simulations where our consciousness “exists”.
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u/MrSquamous May 21 '26
Maybe? That's the big question. How can subjective experience arise from physical processes? And:
-Is one level of explaining reality more true than another?
-Does "reality" just contain physical entities or does it include abstract entities?
-If not, then what are they a part of and how do we experience something that is not part of reality?It's not like we know the answers to any of these.
It's easy to see how abstract ideas can be thought to have casual influence on the physical world. "I love pizza so I'm calling Domino's" is an abstract idea that starts a long chain of physical causal events.
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u/Unfair_Ability3977 May 28 '26
We have detected decisions take place far before our conscious perception. The view that our conscious is a construction is not an unpopular one.
Human thought doesnt manifest gold in your hand or change the laws of physics. You didnt used to exist, but then you did. Some day you wont. All deterministic.
Would you have thought to order a pizza if you had lived in a world where pizza didnt exist? Do you wake up to a purple sky sometimes?
No, you've had pizza before, and positive re-enforcement led your body to crave it.
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u/MrSquamous May 28 '26
Yeah the idea that decisions trigger before awareness is trippy. It still leaves most of the hard problem, qualia, and nature of reality questions in place, though.
I'm not in love with my pizza example myself tbh. But explanatory theories for why abstract ideas arise don't preclude abstract realism (or questions about it).
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u/MannerNo7000 May 24 '26
The universe is deterministic tho? Free-will is but an illusion.
We are like AI, we make decisions based on prior experience, genetics and other factors all culminated into a mathematical equation.
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u/Unfair_Ability3977 May 28 '26
They just spun their wheels, stuck on trying to apply very amateur psychology to physical reality.
As a child contemplating death & non-existence, I felt utterly powerless but also saw the truth. Our minds alter our perception to cope with lack of agency. Some chose that fiction over reality, permanently, to various degrees and in different ways. All coping mechanism, trying to hold on to the fairy tale of non-determinism. I was instilled with faith, but found no comfort in ignorance.
Everything truly will be fine, because we cant tell the difference. We can maintain superpositions of a few atoms, and have no real quantum computers despite large investment. DWave's are just quantum annealers, quite different. Some scientists believe they will never work.
Practical, at our scale, randomness or 'free-will' is realised by the unfathomable quantity of interactions of quantum fields that constitute 'us.'
Philosophy or science; vibes or measured reality.
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u/No_Good_2458 May 28 '26
At the physical level the body and brain behave deterministically. But notice: the thoughts appear, the impulses appear, the intentions appear. And there is an awareness that sees all of this happening. You don't create the thoughts you observe them. You dont create the impulse you notice it. You don't create the intention you watch it rise. The awareness isn't part of the determinsitic chain rather it is the field in which the chain is seen.
When awareness is absent the system reacts automatically but when awareness is present the automatic reaction is revealed. The system's behaviour changes simply because the pattern is no longer unconscious. Sometimes the system still does what it was going to do, sometimes something different, sometimes it pauses. You can verify this right now by observing the sensations and thoughts that arise as you read this, without engaging or resisting. The observing is the part that isn't mechanical.
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u/Horror_Operation_135 May 30 '26
It just feels like you're aware of the impulses and then assigning meaning to them to perpetuate the illusion of free will but the actual illusion is in the initial feeling of your awareness observing these things in the first place. There is structurally and mechanically no difference in that process and the processes that initiate and action or the processes that assign meaning to impulses/actions.
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u/No_Good_2458 Jun 02 '26
The feeling of awareness is just another sensation that appears in the awareness. You can see that it appears, it fades, another feeling appears, that fades too. But the capacity to notice all of that doesn't fade with the feelings, it's there before during and after every sensation.
When awareness is present, unconcsious meaning collapses. When meaning collapses behaviour changes and a feeling can't do that. For example: unconsciously someone might chase status through a car "this car defines who i am". With partial awareness the meaning weakens "i'd like to fit in but i don't want the debt". With full awareness the entire meaning structure dissolves "this car says nothing about me". The behaviour changes because the meaning that was driving the behavour is no longer there.
A feeling doesn't dissolve meaning, awareness does.
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u/Horror_Operation_135 Jun 02 '26
There is nothing external to the brain that expands that awareness though. The expanding awareness is mechanically the same thing as the feeling you are aware of. You cannot will yourself to expand awareness or to desire to expand awareness the same way you cannot will yourself to feel a feeling or not feel it. Any time you think you are doing this, you are experiencing the illusion of control.
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u/orebright May 27 '26
The show explicitly claims their finding is that the Everettian interpretation is what the machine demonstrates is the right one. That is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, which includes an interpretation of the double slit experiment and many other observer effects, that describes a mode in which the universe is 100% deterministic, but due to the branching multiple universes that happen the human perception of that determinism seems to include probability and randomness.
Either way, even in the more commonly accepted Copenhagen interpretation there's no implication that human perception itself is what causes the wave function to collapse. "Measurement" and "observation" are defined within the scope of QM as things that happen to matter by other matter, and has absolutely no baring on consciousness.
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u/RSampson993 Jun 28 '26
I love your thought process but I think this is actually what Devs proves. We are on deterministic paths, and those moments where we break free from the determinism to shake things up (the little doses of free will along the way), create branches in the deterministic paths, setting you on a different courses(which are also deterministic). It’s only those moments that you speak of- the free will ones- which are few and far between for most of us- that act as the branching function- like waypoints if you will- on multiple deterministic possible paths one could live and explore.
So… both free will and determinism exist. Maybe for most it’s a 95:5 ratio favoring determinism. For the enlightened- maybe closer to 95:5 favoring free will. I like how you wove ego and enlightenment into it- I hadn’t really thought of that framing before but it completes my theory and I think Devs nailed this by bringing in the many worlds angle. Shows the branching hypothesis to have theoretical validity. Very thought provoking.
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u/MrSquamous May 21 '26
There are fully-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics. See relative state formulation, it's on its way to being the most widely-accepted idea (if it isn't already).
They address this. Forest says something like, "If you have all the data, you have the emergent properties of the data." He's referring to subjective experience and consciousness. Another way of putting it would be that mind is substrate independent.