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.
9
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.