Notes from the Underground

The Spiteful Ghost in the World-Machine

From Dostoevsky’s Counterpredictive Gambit to the Logic of Freedom ✨

1. The Underground Man’s Revolt Against the ‘Stone Wall’

1.1. The Crystal Palace and the Laws of Nature

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella, Notes from the Underground, serves as a profound and prescient critique of the rationalist and deterministic ideologies that captivated the European intellectual landscape of the 19th century. The work’s unnamed narrator, the “Underground Man,” is a retired civil servant who has retreated into a squalid St. Petersburg apartment, a physical “underground” that mirrors his psychological alienation. 1 He introduces himself as a “sick,” “spiteful,” and “unattractive” man, a creature of paradox and self-loathing who revels in his own misery. 1 In an author’s note, Dostoevsky clarifies that this character, though imaginary, is not only possible but a necessary and inevitable product of his societal circumstances, a representative of a “generation still living”. 4 This establishes the Underground Man not as a mere eccentric, but as a symptom of a deep-seated spiritual and philosophical malady.

The primary object of the Underground Man’s venomous polemic is the ascendant philosophy of “rational egoism,” a doctrine most famously articulated in Russia by the radical thinker Nikolay Chernyshevsky in his 1863 utopian novel, What Is to Be Done?. 6 This ideology, rooted in Enlightenment thought, posited that human beings are fundamentally rational creatures. It held that if individuals could be properly educated about their true self-interest, they would naturally and invariably choose what is best for them, leading to a harmonious and perfected society. 6 In this view, evil and suffering are merely the products of ignorance, errors in calculation that science and reason would eventually eliminate.

Dostoevsky crystallizes this utopian vision in a single, powerful symbol: the “Crystal Palace”. 10 This image was inspired by the real Crystal Palace built for London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, a marvel of cast iron and glass that Dostoevsky himself had seen and which, for his contemporaries, embodied the triumph of modern technology and rational design. 11 In the novella, the Crystal Palace becomes a metaphor for the ultimate rational society—an “eternally indestructible” edifice where human life is perfectly organized according to scientific principles, where all desires are satisfied, and where suffering is “unthinkable”. 6 It represents a future where human behavior, having been fully understood, can be tabulated and predicted, ensuring perpetual peace and contentment.

Underpinning this vision of the Crystal Palace is a belief in the absolute authority of the “laws of nature,” which the Underground Man reduces to the mathematical certainty of “two times two equals four”. 13 This simple equation becomes a potent metaphor for the deterministic logic that governs the rationalist worldview. It is presented as an unassailable truth, a “stone wall” that one cannot argue with or deny. 2 For the proponents of the Crystal Palace, these laws are the foundation upon which utopia will be built. For the Underground Man, however, this stone wall is an object of profound contempt. It represents a reality that controls man rather than being controlled by him, a closed system of facts that leaves no room for genuine thought, creativity, or, most importantly, will. 10

The Underground Man’s critique transcends mere political or social disagreement. His rebellion is aimed at a fundamental ontological and metaphysical reduction of the human being. The true horror of the Crystal Palace is not that it is a flawed social plan, but that it represents a universe in which human subjectivity itself is rendered obsolete. His primary objection is not practical but deeply existential: he hates the Crystal Palace “for the sole reason that one cannot put out one’s tongue at it”. 6 This seemingly childish act of defiance is, for him, the last bastion of personhood. He fears a world where all human desires and caprices can be calculated according to a “real mathematical formula,” a world where, once this formula is discovered, man will “at once cease to feel desire”. 17 In such a world, a person is no longer an agent but is transformed into an “organ stop” or a “piano key,” a mere component in a vast, impersonal mechanism. 6 The threat of the Crystal Palace, therefore, is not that it constrains freedom, but that it promises to annihilate the very ground of human existence, which the Underground Man locates in un-calculable, irrational, and spontaneous volition.

1.2. The ‘Most Advantageous Advantage’: Caprice as a Counterpredictive Strategy

Confronted with the seemingly unbreachable “stone wall” of natural law and rationalism, the Underground Man articulates a radical and desperate defense of human freedom. He argues that there exists a “most advantageous advantage” which has been overlooked by all the rationalist system-builders—an advantage so precious that a person will consciously act against all other interests to preserve it. 19 This ultimate good is “one’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy”. 20 It is this capacity for arbitrary, irrational, and unpredictable action that, in his view, shatters all systems and theories and proves that a person is more than just a “piano key”. 19

The Underground Man’s entire mode of being can be understood as a “counterpredictive gambit.” He recognizes that in a world governed by reason and self-interest, the ultimate act of rebellion is to be unreasonable and self-destructive. He declares that a man, even if showered with every earthly blessing, might “deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish… simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element”. 10 He will act against his own health, his own profit, and his own logic precisely to assert that he is not a predictable machine whose behavior can be plotted on a “table of logarithms”. 13 This is his method of “sticking out his tongue” at the world-machine, a constant, spiteful assertion of his own volition against the crushing weight of determinism. 11

This passionate defense of caprice and the rejection of a fixed, rational human nature positions the Underground Man as a foundational figure in existentialist literature. 7 He is a forerunner of the absurd hero who must create his own values and define his own essence in a world devoid of inherent meaning or purpose. 20 His insistence that freedom, even the freedom to suffer, is the highest human value echoes throughout the works of later existentialists like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. 15

However, Dostoevsky does not present this rebellion as a triumphant model of authentic existence. The freedom of the Underground Man is pathological, self-defeating, and ultimately tragic. His “acute consciousness,” his relentless over-analysis of every motive, leads not to decisive action but to a profound “inertia”—a state of “conscious sitting-with-the-hands-folded”. 17 He is paralyzed by his own intellect, which reveals to him an infinite regress of causes for any potential action, leaving him with no “primary” or “infallible foundation” upon which to act. 17 The “direct person of action,” whom he envies, acts decisively because he mistakes secondary causes for primary ones, but the Underground Man’s hyper-awareness makes such simple conviction impossible. 2

This reveals a fundamental tension within the concept of freedom itself. The Underground Man’s freedom is defined purely in the negative: it is the freedom from reason, from advantage, from predictability. Because it lacks any positive content or moral aim, it can only manifest as spiteful, reactive negation. His most significant “free” acts in the novella’s second part—his pathetic attempts to duel with an officer, his disastrous intrusion at a dinner party, and his cruel psychological torment of the prostitute Liza—are all exercises in humiliation, both of others and of himself. 1 Dostoevsky thus demonstrates the insufficiency of a freedom defined solely by its opposition to determinism. Such a purely negative freedom is an empty and self-destructive force. Through the miserable failure of his protagonist, Dostoevsky implicitly argues that genuine freedom must be more than mere unpredictability; it must be tethered to a positive moral framework, which for Dostoevsky himself was a vision of Christian love and conscious self-sacrifice. 2 The Underground Man’s story is a profound cautionary tale about the spiritual abyss that opens when freedom is divorced from a conception of the good, becoming a disease rather than a divine gift.

2. The Philosophical Architecture of Predictability and Agency

2.1. The Gaze of Laplace’s Demon: The Logic of Causal Determinism

To fully grasp the philosophical depth of the Underground Man’s rebellion, it is necessary to move beyond literary metaphor and formally articulate the worldview he so intuitively despises. The intellectual specter haunting Notes from the Underground is Causal Determinism, the thesis, roughly speaking, that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. 23 According to this doctrine, the state of the universe at any given moment is the inevitable effect of its immediately preceding state and the inevitable cause of the state that follows, creating an unbroken chain of causality stretching from the beginning of time into the infinite future. 23

The most famous and powerful articulation of this idea was formulated by the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace in his 1814 A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities. Laplace imagined a vast intelligence—later dubbed “Laplace’s demon”—possessing complete knowledge of the physical state of the universe at a single instant. 24 This demon would know “all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed”. 24 Laplace asserted that if this intellect were also “vast enough to submit these data to analysis,” it could “embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom”. 24 For such an intelligence, “nothing would be uncertain and the future, just like the past, would be present to its eyes”. 23

Laplace’s vision of determinism is founded upon bedrock philosophical principles, most notably the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the axiom that nothing can happen without a cause that produces it. 25 This form of “scientific fatalism” is distinct from older, theological forms of fatalism, which located the source of destiny in the will of gods or a pre-written fate. 23 The threat posed by Laplacian determinism is colder and more impersonal: it is not a divine plan but the inexorable “strings of physical necessity” linked to the far-past state of the world that dictate every future event, including every human thought and action. 23 While subsequent developments in physics—such as thermodynamic irreversibility, quantum indeterminacy, and chaos theory—have challenged the practical possibility of such a demon, the core metaphysical concept remains a powerful force in the free will debate. 24 Chaos theory, for instance, demonstrates how tiny variations in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes, making long-term prediction impossible in practice; however, it does not defeat the demon in principle, as the demon is hypothesized to know the initial conditions with infinite precision. 24

The enduring psychological power of Laplacian determinism stems from its brilliant rhetorical conflation of a metaphysical thesis (that the universe is a determined causal system) with an epistemic possibility (that the future is therefore predictable). The figure of the demon transforms an abstract claim about causality into a concrete and terrifying image of being completely known and, by extension, controlled. The fear is not merely that our actions are caused, but that our entire life story could, in principle, be read in advance from a book of cosmic initial conditions. 23 The popular metaphor of the universe as a “world-machine” or a clockwork mechanism perfectly captures this fusion of the determined and the knowable. A machine is not just a deterministic system; it is a system that can be understood, whose operations can be calculated, and whose future states can be predicted by anyone who possesses the blueprint.

This explains the intensely personal and visceral nature of the Underground Man’s rebellion. He is not engaging in a dispassionate critique of a philosophical paper; he is recoiling from the chilling gaze of Laplace’s demon. His fight is against the horror of epistemic finality, the idea that his “self” could be fully captured and calculated by the demon’s formula. His insistence on caprice and irrationality is a desperate attempt to prove that he is not merely a cog in the world-machine, but a ghost within it—an unpredictable, un-calculable agent whose story cannot be foretold. He fights to escape the demon’s omniscience, which he rightly equates with his own ontological death.

To clarify the intricate landscape of this debate, the following table compares the central philosophical positions on free will and determinism, situating the unique stances of the Underground Man and, later, Jenann Ismael within this broader context.

Position	Determinism True?	Free Will Exists?	Nature of Physical Laws	Source of Freedom / Constraint	Key Metaphor
Hard Determinism	Yes	No	Prescriptive, Governing	Freedom is an illusion; all actions are necessitated by the past and laws.	Clockwork Universe
Metaphysical Libertarianism	No	Yes	Non-deterministic or allow for agent-causal exceptions.	Freedom comes from being an “uncaused causer” or from indeterminacy.	Garden of Forking Paths
Classical Compatibilism	Yes	Yes (redefined)	Prescriptive, Governing	Freedom is acting on one’s desires without external coercion.	A River Flowing Unimpeded
Underground Man’s Gambit	Yes (accepts the “wall”)	Yes (as caprice)	Prescriptive, but insufficient to define the self.	Freedom is the capacity for irrational, counter-predictive rebellion against reason.	Sticking One’s Tongue at the Crystal Palace
Ismael’s Compatibilism	Yes	Yes	Descriptive (Humean patterns)	Freedom is self-governance within the block universe; our actions co-determine the pattern.	Being an Author of a Chapter in a Pre-existing (but not pre-written) Book

2.2. The Predictor’s Paradox: Formalizing the Counterpredictive Agent

The Underground Man’s intuitive strategy of rebellion finds a precise, formal expression in 20th and 21st-century philosophy through the concept of the “counterpredictive agent” and the logical puzzle it generates. Philosophers, most notably Jenann Ismael, have defined a “counterpredictive device” as any system—be it a simple machine with flashing lights or a complex, conscious agent—that is designed to take as input a prediction about its own future behavior and then act in a way that falsifies that prediction. 27 For example, if the device is fed the prediction “you will flash the green light,” it is programmed to flash the red light, and vice versa. 28

This concept gives rise to what has been termed the “Paradox of Predictability” (PoP). 27 The paradox emerges when one imagines a scenario where a Laplacean intelligence is forced to interact with such a device. The logic unfolds into a sharp contradiction:

By definition, the Laplacean intelligence, possessing complete knowledge of the system’s initial state (including the wiring of the counterpredictive device) and the deterministic laws, must be able to correctly predict the device’s future state. 28
By definition, the counterpredictive device must be able to act contrary to any prediction that is revealed to it. 27

What, then, happens when the intelligence makes its prediction and communicates it to the device? If it predicts “green,” the device will flash “red,” falsifying the prediction. But the omniscient intelligence, knowing this, should have predicted “red” in the first place. Yet if it predicts “red,” the device will flash “green,” again proving the prediction wrong. 28 The situation appears to be logically impossible, generating a self-defeating causal loop. 28 Some philosophers have seized upon this paradox to argue for compatibilism, suggesting that it demonstrates how a universe can be fully deterministic yet fundamentally unpredictable, thereby leaving a “loophole” for free will. 27

The resolution of this paradox reveals something fundamental about the nature of prediction itself. The classical image of Laplace’s demon implicitly assumes a radical separation between the observer (the demon) and the observed system (the universe). The demon is imagined as standing outside the system, gazing upon it without interacting with it. 24 The Paradox of Predictability, however, collapses this separation. By forcing the intelligence to “reveal its prediction,” the paradox transforms the demon from a passive, external observer into an active, embedded participant. The act of communicating the prediction is itself a physical event that becomes a new causal input into the very system it is trying to predict. 27

The system the demon must now predict is not simply System, but System + Prediction. To calculate the outcome of this new, larger system, the demon must factor in the causal effects of its own predictive act. But this leads to a vicious infinite regress. The demon must predict the behavior of a system that includes its own prediction, which means it must calculate Prediction(System + Prediction(System +…)). This logical structure is akin to trying to write a book that contains, as a chapter, a perfect copy of the entire book itself—a task that is logically impossible.

This demonstrates that the paradox is not really about determinism versus indeterminism, nor does it require any appeal to quantum mechanics or chaos. It is a paradox about the logical limits of computation and knowledge for any agent that is embedded within the system it seeks to fully comprehend. The very act of making and revealing a complete prediction about a system of which you are a causally integrated part is logically incoherent. This provides a rigorous, formal foundation for the Underground Man’s passionate, psychological intuition. His spiteful contrarianism is his way of ensuring he is always part of the system being predicted, thereby making any final, stable prediction impossible. He intuitively understands that by reacting to any attempt to define him, he can always “have the last word” and escape the epistemic cage of another’s calculation.

3. A Compatibilist Reconciliation via Modern Physics and Philosophy

3.1. Reframing the Problem in How Physics Makes Us Free

The philosophical turmoil embodied by the Underground Man and formalized in the Predictor’s Paradox finds a sophisticated and compelling resolution in the work of philosopher Jenann Ismael. In her 2016 book, How Physics Makes Us Free, and associated writings, Ismael undertakes a project to move beyond the simplistic and often misleading caricatures of determinism that have long dominated the free will debate. 32 Her goal is to provide a more nuanced account of what modern physics actually tells us about ourselves and our place in the natural order, arguing that a deeper understanding ultimately affirms, rather than denies, our sense of freedom. 34

Ismael’s argument proceeds along several interconnected lines. First, she provides a robust, naturalistic account of the self. Rejecting any need for a supernatural or Cartesian soul, she argues that the self can be understood as a highly complex, physically realized system that has evolved the capacity for self-governance. 35 She employs the helpful metaphor of the self as a corporation: a distributed entity with many parts performing different functions, all coordinated by an “executive committee” (analogous to higher-level cognitive functions) that gathers information, deliberates on all-things-considered judgments, and directs action. 35 This model grounds agency firmly within the physical world, portraying it as an emergent feature of biological complexity.

Second, Ismael launches a direct assault on the traditional “Consequence Argument” against free will, which holds that if our actions are the necessary consequences of the past and the laws of nature, and since we cannot control the past or the laws, we cannot control our actions. 35 Ismael challenges both of the argument’s core premises.

To challenge the premise that we cannot control the laws, she advocates for a Humean conception of physical laws. On this view, laws are not external, prescriptive edicts or “iron rails” that govern events from on high. Rather, they are simply descriptive summaries of the contingent regularities and patterns that happen to obtain across the entire four-dimensional spacetime manifold, or “Block Universe”. 35 If laws are descriptions of the total pattern of events, and if our actions are part of that pattern, then our actions are among the facts that, taken together, make the laws what they are. In this sense, we are not governed by the laws; our collective behavior is part of what constitutes the laws.

To challenge the premise that we cannot control the past, Ismael leverages two key insights from physics: the Block Universe perspective, in which past, present, and future are equally real, and the time-symmetry of fundamental physical laws. 35 Most fundamental laws (like those of Newtonian mechanics) work just as well backwards as forwards; they entail the past from the future just as they entail the future from the past. 35 This undermines the deeply ingrained intuition that the past has a special, fixed, and coercive power over the present. Instead of seeing the past as “forcing” the present, Ismael suggests we see the entire timeline as a self-consistent whole. Our present choices, as part of this whole, must be consistent with the past. Therefore, making a choice now places constraints on what the microscopic state of the past must have been in order for our choice to come about according to the laws. 35 This is not a claim of backward causation, but a radical reframing of the relationship between events across time.

This reframing leads to Ismael’s most significant philosophical move: shifting the locus of freedom from a single, isolated “moment of choice” to the nature of the self as a holistic, goal-directed system operating over time. The traditional debate is obsessed with the question of whether an agent “could have done otherwise” at the precise instant of a decision. 36 Ismael’s framework dissolves this problem by redefining the agent. The “self” is not a dimensionless point making choices in a vacuum; it is an extended, information-processing, self-representing structure. 35 The corporation metaphor is again crucial: a corporation’s “decision” is not a magical moment of volition but a complex, distributed process of information gathering, modeling, deliberation, and implementation. 35 Freedom, on this view, is the emergent capacity of this entire organized system to regulate its own behavior in accordance with its internally generated goals and models of the world. It is a property of the system’s global organization, not a mysterious power that violates causality at a single point. The fact that any given action is determined by its immediate antecedents is no longer a threat to freedom, because the agent is that complex, organized nexus of antecedents, structured for the very purpose of self-governance.

3.2. The Impossibility of Embedded Oracles: Ismael’s Resolution

Jenann Ismael’s analysis of the counterpredictive agent and the Paradox of Predictability (PoP) provides the capstone to her compatibilist project, offering a direct and logical resolution to the threat of Laplacian determinism that so tormented the Underground Man. Her work, particularly in papers like “Determinism, Counterpredictive Devices, and the Impossibility of Laplacean Intelligences,” argues that the paradox is not a mere curiosity but a profound demonstration of a fundamental limit on knowledge for any agent embedded within a deterministic universe. 27

Ismael contends that the PoP proves the logical impossibility of what she calls a “natural oracle”—that is, any subsystem, whether a human or a supercomputer, that is embedded within a universe and is capable of calculating and knowing all of its future events. 28 The reason for this impossibility lies in the self-referential causal loop that is created when the predictor’s act of prediction becomes part of the system being predicted. As established previously, the oracle is forced to reveal its prediction, making the prediction itself a new causal factor that influences the outcome. The predictor “can’t get ahead of the mechanism” because the mechanism’s behavior is, by design, contingent upon the predictor’s own output. 28

Ismael deepens this analysis by connecting it to the logical limits of computability discovered in the 20th century, such as Alan Turing’s proof of the undecidability of the “halting problem”. 27 These results from the foundations of mathematics and computer science show that there are inherent, logical limitations on what any computational system can know about its own future behavior. It is logically impossible to build a machine that can, in all cases, predict whether another arbitrary machine (or itself) will eventually halt or run forever. The PoP is a physical manifestation of this type of logical constraint on self-knowledge.

Crucially, Ismael’s conclusion holds even if the universe is perfectly deterministic. The impossibility of a natural oracle is not a metaphysical claim about the nature of causality, but an epistemic and logical claim about the limits of knowledge from within. Determinism, the thesis that the past and the laws are sufficient to fix the future, does not entail predictability-from-within, the thesis that an agent inside the universe can know that fixed future in advance. This distinction is the key to dissolving the traditional conflict.

This resolution provides a powerful compatibilist argument that preserves the subjective experience of an open future without requiring the rejection of deterministic physics. The deep-seated feeling that our choices are not a “foregone conclusion” 34 and that the “scales of fate hang in the balance” during deliberation 36 is not an illusion to be explained away. According to Ismael’s analysis, this feeling accurately reflects our epistemic situation. The future feels open to us precisely because, from our embedded perspective, it is epistemically open. No information is or can be available to us that would render the process of deliberation redundant. We cannot simply “look up” the answer to what we will do in some cosmic database, because the paradox shows that no such database can be reliably constructed or accessed from within the system. The very process of choosing—of gathering information, weighing reasons, and forming an intention—is the irreducible process by which the future becomes determined from our perspective.

Ismael’s work thus reconciles the physicist’s “God’s-eye view” of a determined block universe with the agent’s first-person, phenomenological experience of an open and contingent future. The Underground Man’s desperate, spiteful rebellion was predicated on the belief that determinism implied that he could be fully calculated and thus nullified. Ismael’s logic shows that this belief was mistaken. The threat of the omniscient, embedded predictor is not a real one, but a logical phantom. Freedom does not require a metaphysical break in the causal chain, only an epistemic shield that is guaranteed by the very logic of our embedded existence.

4. Synthesis—Freedom as Narrative Authorship

4.1. Dostoevsky’s Demon and Ismael’s Logic

The philosophical journey from the spidery prose of a 19th-century novella to the precise logic of 21st-century philosophy of physics reveals a remarkable continuity of thought. The central conflict of Notes from the Underground can be seen as a passionate, psychological dramatization of the very logical puzzles that Jenann Ismael later analyzes with formal rigor. The “world-machine” and the “Crystal Palace” that the Underground Man rages against are potent literary prefigurations of the deterministic universe of Laplace. 10 His defiant “counterpredictive gambit”—his commitment to irrationality and caprice—is a visceral, lived instantiation of the logical “counterpredictive device”. 10

The Underground Man intuitively grasps what Ismael’s work demonstrates logically: that an agent’s freedom can be preserved by making itself an impossible target for complete prediction by any other agent within its system. His rebellion is a lifelong effort to be the one variable that no “table of logarithms” can ever fully account for, the ghost that haunts the rational machine. 17 He senses that if his next action can be perfectly predicted and told to him, his will becomes superfluous, a mere link in a chain. His spite is his method for constantly breaking that predictive chain, for ensuring that his own response to the prediction is always a new, un-calculated factor.

Where Dostoevsky and Ismael diverge is in the nature of their resolutions. For Dostoevsky, writing from a deeply religious and moral framework, the problem is presented as a spiritual tragedy. The Underground Man’s rebellion against determinism, untethered from any positive moral purpose like faith or love, becomes a nihilistic and self-destructive pathology. 2 He successfully asserts his unpredictability, but at the cost of his humanity, descending into a hell of his own making. His freedom is real but poisonous. Dostoevsky leaves the reader with a sense that the only escape from the twin prisons of determinism and nihilistic freedom is a leap of faith toward a transcendent good.

Ismael, in contrast, offers a cool, immanent, and logical resolution. She defuses the conflict by demonstrating that the initial threat—the possibility of a perfect, embedded predictor—is itself logically incoherent. The Laplacean demon that torments the Underground Man cannot exist within the universe. Therefore, the desperate, self-lacerating rebellion may not be necessary. The freedom to be unpredictable is not something that must be pathologically clawed back from the jaws of science; it is a feature already guaranteed by the logic of our embedded, interactive existence. Ismael’s philosophy drains the poison from the Underground Man’s freedom by showing that the deterministic world is not the epistemic prison he imagined it to be.

4.2. The Uncalculable Self: Implications for a Narrative Ontology

The entire arc of this investigation, from Dostoevsky’s tormented character to Ismael’s elegant physics, ultimately converges on a question of central importance to the field of inquiry: narrative ontology. At its core, the struggle for free will against determinism can be reframed as a struggle for the right to narrative authorship. To be a predictable “piano key” is to be an object in a story written by another—whether that author is God, the laws of nature, or Laplace’s demon. 7 It is to have one’s entire life, with all its choices and passions, reduced to a foregone conclusion, a mere playing-out of a pre-existing script.

The Underground Man’s entire existence is a violent refusal to be an object in someone else’s narrative. His Notes are his frantic attempt to seize the pen, to define himself on his own terms and make sense of his own being. 11 He would rather author a story of misery, spite, and failure than be a happy, contented character in the predictable utopian narrative of the Crystal Palace. His irrationality is his tool for ensuring his personal narrative contains a “twist” that no external narrator could have anticipated. He fights, with every fiber of his being, to be the subjective protagonist of his own story, not a calculated object in the grand, objective narrative of science.

Jenann Ismael’s work provides the modern philosophical architecture to support this narrative conception of freedom. Her demonstration of the impossibility of an embedded oracle is, in narrative terms, a proof that no agent can read the final chapter of another agent’s book before it has been written. From the internal perspective of any character in the universe, the stories of all other characters are fundamentally open-ended and must be discovered through interaction, not calculated in advance. Our lives are not scripts to be read, but narratives to be performed.

In the context of a narrative ontology, freedom is therefore not the metaphysical power to violate causality, but the epistemic and logical guarantee of freedom from being fully and finally narrated by another. It is the inalienable status of being an un-calculable, self-interpreting, and self-constituting protagonist in one’s own life story. The future is not fixed for us as agents, because the very act of our living—our choosing, our acting, our interacting—is the process that writes the narrative into the fabric of spacetime. The Underground Man felt the necessity of this authorial freedom in his bones and launched a pathological rebellion to secure it. Jenann Ismael’s philosophy provides a basis for understanding why this freedom is not a desperate illusion or a spiritual prize to be won, but a fundamental and inalienable feature of our existence as complex, embedded agents in a knowable, yet ever-unfolding, world. The counterpredictive gambit, whether expressed as spiteful rebellion or logical paradox, is the ultimate defense of the self as a story that must be lived, not calculated.

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