mrpink essays

The Practice Without a Doer

What the quantum mechanics, chaos theory, and contemplative traditions have in common is something uncomfortable: there is no one doing. Only doing happening.

Before getting into the topic, it helps to lay some groundwork. Because what follows only makes sense if you accept a certain framework — one that most people don't take for granted.

I'm a naturalist. That means I start from the belief that nothing supernatural exists: no soul, no magic, no esoteric energies that escape the physical laws of the universe. Everything that happens, happens because the universe operates according to certain rules, and nothing interrupts that causal chain from the outside.

From there, almost effortlessly, an uncomfortable conclusion follows: the universe is deterministic. Every event is a consequence of the ones before it. There is no breaking point where something "decides" to go off-script.

I'll anticipate objections. If you're already fairly on board with what I've been saying, feel free to skip the next section.

The case against free will

The pushback I hear most often.

The first: "What about quantum mechanics? Doesn't it introduce indeterminacy?" Yes, but not the kind that rescues free will. Quantum mechanics deals in probability distributions — which is another way of saying randomness. And randomness isn't freedom. Sapolsky makes this point well in Determined: at the macroscopic scale, quantum effects cancel out, because so many indeterminate events are happening simultaneously that their randomness compensates statistically. For a single neuron to be affected by quantum indeterminacy — let alone an entire brain — you'd need statistically absurd coincidences.

The second: "If everything is deterministic, why can't we predict things?" Two reasons. First, because simulating the universe would require, literally, another universe. The information needed to predict the next state is the complete information of the current state. There's no shortcut. Second, chaos theory: tiny differences in initial conditions generate enormous deviations over time. The system is deterministic, but not predictable. Those are different things.

There's a third idea worth bringing in — not as an objection to determinism, but as a deepening of it. It's what Stephen Wolfram calls computational irreducibility. The idea is this: even if we had all the computing power in the universe, there would be no way to know what happens at second N+1 without having computed seconds 1, 2, 3... through N. There is no analytical formula that lets us skip ahead. The only way to know what happens next is to run the calculation, step by step.

This has a beautiful consequence: time stops being a mystery. Time is that step-by-step calculation. There is no "Platonic" time floating separately — there is a universe iterating. Each moment is the execution of the next computational step, and so the next moment only exists when it is computed. The arrow of time, then, is not something the universe has. It's something the universe does.

For our purposes, this closes the last escape hatch. Even if we could simulate ourselves on a sufficiently powerful computer, we'd still have to run the calculation — which means we'd be exactly who we are, doing exactly what we do. There's no way to "see from the outside" what we're going to do, because that seeing from the outside would require doing what we're going to do. Freedom through anticipation isn't available either.

What remains is this: a universe that runs its course without free agents, without genuine decisions, without a "self" that breaks the causal chain. What you do tomorrow, what I'm writing now, is determined. Not by a god or a mystical destiny, but by the simple consequence of how particles arranged themselves up to this moment.

This may sound depressing. But the interesting question isn't whether it's depressing. The question is: if this is true, what's the point of trying? What's the point of understanding, improving, practicing?

That's what I want to get into.

A note on the word "system"

Before going further, a clarification. I'm going to use the word "system" several times, and it's worth being precise about what I mean — because within the naturalist framework I've been laying out, it carries particular weight.

As biological beings, we are complex systems of interdependent parts: cells, tissues, organs, neural networks, chemical processes, feedback loops. That's not a metaphor — it's a literal description. And the non-dualism implicit in naturalism — if nothing supernatural exists, there is no soul separate from the body — leads to a conclusion that's hard to digest: it's not that we have a body, we are a body. It's not that we possess a system, we are that system.

There is no "self" standing outside the body, observing it, driving it like a car. The sense that there's a driver inside is one of the most persistent illusions the system produces — but that doesn't make it real.

When I write "the system processed something," "the system let go," "the system understood," I'm not referring to a technical abstraction. I mean you, me, the whole organism doing what it does. The word is cold, but the reality it points to is the same as always: ourselves, without the mythology of an internal agent.

The insight in meditation

A few days ago, in the middle of a particularly clear meditation session, I saw something that kept me thinking for days afterward: thoughts aren't special events. They don't carry more weight than an ambient sound, a sensation in the body, a heartbeat. They're just more things that happen.

It sounds obvious written out. But living it — not understanding it intellectually, but seeing it from the inside — is something else.

And almost immediately, like a reflex, the philosophical question arrived: if all of this is causal process, if there's no "self" deciding anything, what's the point of "understanding" something? Why bother meditating, thinking, improving? If everything is determined, isn't effort absurd?

It's one of those questions that seems to dissolve the ground beneath your feet.

The fatalism trap

The argument is seductive in its simplicity: if there's no free agent, then there's no point in doing anything. Whatever I do was always going to happen anyway. Might as well give up.

But there's a hidden error there.

Giving up is not an escape from determinism. It's another expression of it. The person who surrenders to the idea that everything is determined is no more free than the one who keeps pushing. They're just expressing a different configuration of the same system.

There's no exit from determinism through surrendering to it. That would be like trying to escape gravity by jumping.

So the question "what do I do with this?" becomes, in fact, empty. There's nothing to "do with" the reality that things are as they are. There are only things being as they are.

Understanding without an agent

There's another, subtler trap — and it's the one that took me the longest to see.

When someone says "I understood something," implicit in that is the idea of a self that takes that understanding and uses it. But if we take seriously the position that there's no free agent, that sentence is problematic. The more precise formulation would be: the system processed new information and that changed how it operates.

It sounds cold, but it's more accurate. A thermostat doesn't "decide" to cool the room. But the temperature information changes its output. And the result is real, measurable, useful. Understanding works similarly: it's information that reconfigures the system, without needing a "self" to administer it.

This also resolves, in passing, a well-known paradox in the contemplative tradition: the deliberate effort to stop trying is still effort. The instruction "let go," practiced with intensity, isn't letting go. It's clinging to the idea of letting go.

How do you get out of that loop? Traditionally, with mystical phrases: you have to let go of the letting go. But from the framework I've been building, it can be said more concretely: the instruction "stop trying" isn't directed at an agent to execute. It's information that, once processed, modifies the patterns that generate the effort.

No one is letting go. There is letting go happening.

Two sides of the same coin

Here's the part that seems most important to me. When you take this to its limit, you notice something curious.

The person who says "there's no free will, so I give up" and the person who says "there's no free will, but I keep going because that's my nature" are doing the same thing. They're two expressions of a system unfolding.

Neither escapes determinism. Both embody it.

The "fatalist" is no more free than the "striver." And the "striver" is no more free than the "fatalist." They're different configurations of the same process.

This is not a depressing conclusion. It's a liberating one, if you let it settle.

Because what it shows is that the question "should I try or not?" is badly framed. There's no "should." There's what you're going to do — which is what your nature, your system, your configuration, your history, is doing and will do. Living, in this framework, is not an act of will. It's the exploration of one's own nature unfolding.

Why this matters when it comes to getting things done

Someone might object: fine, all very nice, but what do I do on Monday morning? How do I lead my startup, make decisions, operate?

Same as always.

The underlying truth — that there's no free agent — doesn't change the decisions you're going to make. It changes your relationship to them. And that relationship is, paradoxically, often healthier when it's released from the weight of believing everything depends on a "self" that has to hold it all together.

Those of us who build companies carry heavy narratives: "I'm the one who has to decide," "I'm the one responsible," "I have to have the vision." These narratives are useful up to a point, but they're also the source of a particular kind of exhaustion — that existential fatigue that comes from believing every micro-decision depends entirely on willpower.

When that belief loosens — not as intellectual pose but as genuine recognition — decisions keep happening, leadership keeps being exercised, things keep moving forward. But there's less internal friction around all of it.

The practice without a doer

There's a connection that keeps surprising me between all of this and contemplative practice.

In the contemplative tradition, the deepest states of concentration share a known characteristic: they don't happen while someone is trying to make them happen. While there's a meditator straining to meditate, nothing interesting occurs. Whatever happens, happens when the system stops sustaining the fiction that someone is controlling it.

Philosophy and meditation converge here. One arrives at the same point through analysis. The other, through direct experience. Both point to the same place: there is no one doing. There is only doing happening.

So what then? Then nothing. And everything. Life goes on. Startups go on. Decisions go on. Practices go on. The difference is that once you see this, the weight is different. It doesn't disappear. It redistributes.

And in my experience, that's already a lot.

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