104. A Tale of Choice and Possibilities

On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilee was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. His great offense? Supporting the radical notion that Earth orbits the Sun—an idea that challenged both the Catholic Church and traditional astronomers. Forced to recant, Galileo lived out his days confined, dying on January 8, 1642.

During that entire time, Galileo never once played a video game. Surprising as it sounds, there were no physical laws preventing video games back then; the universe itself placed no ban on interactive digital entertainment. The real obstacle was a lack of knowledge—computers, electricity, and even the concept of “bits” had yet to be discovered. The same argument can be made for the first humans. The possibility of video games in principle even existed then. Wild, right?

So if the possibility of something like video games existed at a time void of technology what possibilities exist today?

Galileo chose to defend heliocentrism. The Church chose to confine him. But he couldn’t choose to play video games, because the knowledge behind them wouldn’t be created for another three centuries. Likewise, had society possessed a deeper understanding of celestial mechanics or greater open-mindedness, Galileo might have been free. Over time, new explanations emerged, and the Church eventually dropped its opposition to heliocentrism—knowledge had changed, and with it, the world.

If, in Galileo’s day, the possibility of video games was technically real, what breakthroughs lie dormant today? What possibilities of freedom exist now for you while you are alive? Will you try to create the knowledge that makes possibilities a reality or choose stasis? Our choices matter—whether they’re bold declarations of truth or surprising leaps of creativity—and it’s knowledge that makes them possible.

It should be no surprise, then, that when you choose (notice the irony) not to use your free will that it feels subjectively like you don't have any.
- Brett Hall, Free Will