I really liked this post. You can believe in physical laws or in divine intervention. But not both - unless you don’t care about philosophical & intellectual consistency. Also known as reflective equilibrium.
“What Is Reflective Equilibrium? In a two-sentence definition, it is a method of personal reflection designed to bring the different components of our moral life (including principles, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, habits, and desires) into alignment (or equilibrium) with one another. The idea is to use those components to reflect on, revise, and ultimately support and justify one another, and through the process, become a more consistent and coherent person.
— Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre
I don't follow the no-free-will argument. If I put someone in a maze, they can freely choose how to navigate it. If I change the maze while they're in it, I haven't removed their ability to make choices. They might have to reverse or modify their decisions, or even get stuck so no choice is a good one, but I haven't removed their ability to choose, just changed the viable options. Reality is a very large maze, true, where the walls are laws, but I don't see how it’s fundamentally a different situation.
Because, if the laws of physics don’t exist, then they are not responsible for what the particles in your body are doing. So what or who is? And if they do, then by definition, everything you are doing follows the laws of physics. And in that case (as I explain in my book, https://amzn.to/4aMQJD1) while you don’t have free will under physical laws, you have perfect practical free will and will have it forever. And this has implications for things like AI.
Ah, I think I see - we may be thinking of “free will” differently. I see three different scenarios. 1) “No higher-order being exists (or at least interacts), and I have practical free will because my actions can’t be predicted under immutable laws of reality”; 2) “Some higher-order being exists, but I have practical free will because that being’s actions are completely independent of mine”; 3) “Some higher-order being exists, and I don’t have free will because that being’s actions interact with my choices”. It seems to me that the second scenario you talk about in the post could include both 2 and 3, but maybe you were intending it to be only 3.
The issue is, does the higher order being intervene or not? If it does you cannot have any kind of free will. If it doesn’t you have practical free will under the laws of physics.
Seems to me that there's no effective difference to free will between immutable laws making everything deterministic and some higher-order being that can make law changes, given the assumption that there's no causal connection between us and the higher-order being. But this may all just be semantics in what exactly we mean by "free will". In any event, thanks for writing about this and engaging in the discussion, it's been a good exercise to mull it over!
I love the simplicity and clarity of this framework. Honestly not sure I care much about the God bit but the fundamental conclusion about using frameworks to clarify not provide answers is so powerful.
Great question, and Pascal is one of my favorite thinkers, so I'm glad you brought him into it.
The short answer: the tetrad handles love and beauty quite well — because it doesn't claim everything is intellectual. That's actually the whole point of having four lenses instead of one.
Beauty I address directly in Part III of this series (coming soon). The punchline: beauty is the subjective experience of low computational cost. When your pattern-recognition systems click into place efficiently — symmetrical face, elegant proof, a melody that resolves just right — it feels good because processing it is cheap. That's not an intellectual judgment. It's a computational one. Your brain is doing it before "you" even get involved.
Love is where it gets really interesting. The tetrad:
Physics: Love runs on oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin — neurochemistry that evolved to bond mammals who need to cooperate on multi-year child-rearing. The hardware is ancient and non-negotiable.
Math: Pair bonding has formal structure — assortative mating patterns, network properties of social bonds, game-theoretic stability conditions for long-term cooperation. These hold regardless of how the bonding feels.
CS: This is where Pascal's insight lives. "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing" is a perfect description of a computation that runs below the threshold of conscious access. Love isn't non-computational — it's computation that you can't introspect on. Your brain is running a fast evaluation algorithm — integrating hundreds of signals about genetic compatibility, cooperative potential, trustworthiness, shared values — and delivering the result as a feeling rather than a propositional argument. The heart's "reasons" are real reasons. You just don't get to see the source code.
Economics: Pair bonding is a solution to one of the hardest optimization problems in nature: sustaining cooperation between two unrelated individuals over decades, under uncertainty, with massive shared investment (children). Love is the mechanism that makes the commitment credible — because it's not a rational calculation, it can't be easily defected from by rational calculation. That's a feature, not a bug.
So Pascal was exactly right — but for the wrong reason. He thought the heart's reasons were beyond reason. The tetrad says they're beneath it — deeper, faster, more computationally sophisticated than propositional thought, not less. The non-propositional isn't the non-physical or the non-computational. It's the pre-conscious. And the CS lens is precisely the tool that captures what the economics lens — with its assumption of deliberate optimization — misses.
This connects directly to the Simplicity Tax from my first post in this series. Those binary option traders weren't reasoning about simplicity. Their brains were processing the simpler product more fluently and delivering the result as a preference. Love works the same way — it's not a conclusion. It's a fast evaluation running on hardware that predates language by a hundred million years.
I have to disagree. The fact that you can imagine something that is in conflict with the laws of physics does not mean they don’t apply. Your dreaming, as we’ve seen over and over again, is electrical activity in the brain. Everything you think is, demonstrably, electrical activity in the brain.
Certainly interesting although I struggle with the concepts a lot.
Beauty arises from more than low computational cost. A blank sheet of paper has low computational cost but is not beautiful. Beauty exists in the space between chaos and order and is an emergent property greater than the sum of its parts.
On love there is a lot to respond to but on the physics that is obviously an extremely materalist view (cf. maya). On economics, humans are the exception with most mammals making no commitment to mating partners. On CS, I think you’re saying it is a logical deduction but you aren't conscious of it. Whatever that is, I'm not sure you can call it reason / logic or prove or disprove its existence. Kahneman has done plenty of work to show whatever that thinking is, it is far from logical.
All of the major religions talk about the greatest truths being outside the real of intellectualism. You’ll know Pascal himself had such an experience and spoke about a God “not of the philosophers and the scholars”.
These are genuinely good pushbacks — let me take them one at a time, because I think each one actually strengthensthe tetrad rather than weakening it.
The blank paper objection is exactly right, and I was imprecise. Beauty isn't low computational cost — it's high compression ratio. A blank page has low cost but carries no information. Noise has high information but can't be compressed. Beauty lives where you said it does: between chaos and order, where the stimulus carries a lot of information but your brain can encode it cheaply. That's what makes a Bach fugue beautiful and a blank page boring — the fugue is compressible but not trivially so. You nailed the correction. I should have been more careful.
On materialism and maya. I know the maya tradition well — I grew up with it. But notice what the tetrad is doing: it's not saying love is neurochemistry. It's saying neurochemistry is the physics lens on love. Maya would be a claim that the physics lens is the only real lens and everything else is illusion. The tetrad says the opposite: you need all four lenses and none of them reduces to any other. The neurochemistry is real and the felt experience is real and the game-theoretic structure is real. They're different views of the same phenomenon. That's actually closer to Advaita Vedanta than to materialism — multiple levels of description, none privileged.
On mammalian pair bonding. Fair point, but slightly overstated — wolves, gibbons, prairie voles, and quite a few other mammals form lasting pair bonds. Humans aren't as exceptional as they seem. The more interesting point is whypair bonding evolves when it does: it tracks the length of offspring dependency. Human children are helpless for years. That's a physics constraint (brain size, narrow birth canal, long development) driving an economic solution (sustained cooperation). The tetrad predicts pair bonding should appear wherever offspring dependency is long — and it does.
On Kahneman and unconscious processing. Here I think the disagreement is about the word "logical." You're absolutely right that System 1 isn't doing formal propositional logic. But I never said it was. I said it's computation — which is a much broader category. A neural network that integrates hundreds of signals and outputs a feeling is computing, even though it's not reasoning in syllogisms. Kahneman's whole point is that System 1 is fast, parallel, and often remarkably accurate — it just isn't verbal or propositional. That's exactly what the CS lens captures: processing that is real and effective but not accessible to introspection. Calling it "illogical" because it doesn't look like a philosophy seminar undersells what the brain is actually doing.
On Pascal and the God "not of the philosophers." I know the Mémorial well. The experience Pascal describes on the night of November 23, 1654 — the fire, the certainty, the tears of joy — is exactly the kind of phenomenon the tetrad is designed to handle. His experience was real. The neurochemistry was real. The felt certainty was real. What the tetrad asks is: what kind of real? If the laws of physics are exceptionless (which I argued in the https://samirvarma.substack.com/p/the-tetrad?r=hfb1h), then Pascal's experience was generated by his brain under specific conditions — fasting, sleep deprivation, intense intellectual crisis. That doesn't make it less meaningful to Pascal. It means the experience is best understood through the CS lens (what computation was his brain running?) rather than the physics lens (what chemicals were involved?) or the economics lens (what was he optimizing for?). The religions are right that the deepest experiences transcend intellectualism. The tetrad agrees! The CS lens is precisely the lens that captures non-propositional processing. It's the lens for things your brain does that you can't put into words. That's not beyond the tetrad — that's the tetrad's third quadrant doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Changing from low computational cost to high compression ratio creates a new problem of what constitutes ‘information’. There is no information in Bach. As Walter Pater put it “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” precisely because music just is. If you define ‘information’ as 0s and 1s on an MP3 file then Bach can contain the same information / bytes as white noise.
If you need all four lenses to understand a phenomenon and one of those lenses has an extremely materialist viewpoint then the combination of four must have extreme materialism built-in? Or it otherwise faces internal contradictions? Advaita vedanta has many lenses but none of them have materialism built-in (if anything, the many lenses are to help prove the exact opposite of materialism).
You state the laws of physics are exceptionless. That isn’t true in dreams. Does that mean dreams are not real? You might say that the dream really happened but it wasn’t real, in which case what is reality? There is rich history of dreams as test cases in Buddhism (‘awakening’). A similar argument is that Shakespeare is not true but expresses the greatest truths. Physics being exceptionless depends on which plane you are referring to (again back to maya which I knew you’d be familiar with!) That’s before you even touch the hard problem of consciousness.
The distinction between ‘logic’ and ‘computation’ is helpful but quite the stretch to think that this fine distinction is sufficient to explain the God “not of the philosophers or the scholars” which Pascal was referring to. Indeed, immediately before he refers to “GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob”. This is more like the distinction between mythos and logos which is not captured in the difference between logic and computation.
How does the tetrad reach the conclusion that slavery is wrong? Or to forgive the person who murdered your mother? Or that to serve the poorest is the highest calling? These are all questions of which way to orient yourself. Whatever you put in the highest place is God for you. The tetrad doesn’t seem to make any claim to orientation (i.e. the is-ought problem). The economics lens will often lead to an ‘is’ which is repulsive to ‘ought’ (e.g. slavery).
I really liked this post. You can believe in physical laws or in divine intervention. But not both - unless you don’t care about philosophical & intellectual consistency. Also known as reflective equilibrium.
“What Is Reflective Equilibrium? In a two-sentence definition, it is a method of personal reflection designed to bring the different components of our moral life (including principles, emotions, perceptions, beliefs, habits, and desires) into alignment (or equilibrium) with one another. The idea is to use those components to reflect on, revise, and ultimately support and justify one another, and through the process, become a more consistent and coherent person.
— Liberalism as a Way of Life by Alexandre Lefebvre
I don't follow the no-free-will argument. If I put someone in a maze, they can freely choose how to navigate it. If I change the maze while they're in it, I haven't removed their ability to make choices. They might have to reverse or modify their decisions, or even get stuck so no choice is a good one, but I haven't removed their ability to choose, just changed the viable options. Reality is a very large maze, true, where the walls are laws, but I don't see how it’s fundamentally a different situation.
Because, if the laws of physics don’t exist, then they are not responsible for what the particles in your body are doing. So what or who is? And if they do, then by definition, everything you are doing follows the laws of physics. And in that case (as I explain in my book, https://amzn.to/4aMQJD1) while you don’t have free will under physical laws, you have perfect practical free will and will have it forever. And this has implications for things like AI.
Ah, I think I see - we may be thinking of “free will” differently. I see three different scenarios. 1) “No higher-order being exists (or at least interacts), and I have practical free will because my actions can’t be predicted under immutable laws of reality”; 2) “Some higher-order being exists, but I have practical free will because that being’s actions are completely independent of mine”; 3) “Some higher-order being exists, and I don’t have free will because that being’s actions interact with my choices”. It seems to me that the second scenario you talk about in the post could include both 2 and 3, but maybe you were intending it to be only 3.
The issue is, does the higher order being intervene or not? If it does you cannot have any kind of free will. If it doesn’t you have practical free will under the laws of physics.
Seems to me that there's no effective difference to free will between immutable laws making everything deterministic and some higher-order being that can make law changes, given the assumption that there's no causal connection between us and the higher-order being. But this may all just be semantics in what exactly we mean by "free will". In any event, thanks for writing about this and engaging in the discussion, it's been a good exercise to mull it over!
The moment you start thinking about AI, it starts to matter.
I love the simplicity and clarity of this framework. Honestly not sure I care much about the God bit but the fundamental conclusion about using frameworks to clarify not provide answers is so powerful.
More to come.
Looking forward to it
How does the Tetrad explain love and beauty? Not everything exists on the intellectual or physical plane. Not least, there is the non-propositional.
"The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing" - Pascal
Great question, and Pascal is one of my favorite thinkers, so I'm glad you brought him into it.
The short answer: the tetrad handles love and beauty quite well — because it doesn't claim everything is intellectual. That's actually the whole point of having four lenses instead of one.
Beauty I address directly in Part III of this series (coming soon). The punchline: beauty is the subjective experience of low computational cost. When your pattern-recognition systems click into place efficiently — symmetrical face, elegant proof, a melody that resolves just right — it feels good because processing it is cheap. That's not an intellectual judgment. It's a computational one. Your brain is doing it before "you" even get involved.
Love is where it gets really interesting. The tetrad:
Physics: Love runs on oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin — neurochemistry that evolved to bond mammals who need to cooperate on multi-year child-rearing. The hardware is ancient and non-negotiable.
Math: Pair bonding has formal structure — assortative mating patterns, network properties of social bonds, game-theoretic stability conditions for long-term cooperation. These hold regardless of how the bonding feels.
CS: This is where Pascal's insight lives. "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing" is a perfect description of a computation that runs below the threshold of conscious access. Love isn't non-computational — it's computation that you can't introspect on. Your brain is running a fast evaluation algorithm — integrating hundreds of signals about genetic compatibility, cooperative potential, trustworthiness, shared values — and delivering the result as a feeling rather than a propositional argument. The heart's "reasons" are real reasons. You just don't get to see the source code.
Economics: Pair bonding is a solution to one of the hardest optimization problems in nature: sustaining cooperation between two unrelated individuals over decades, under uncertainty, with massive shared investment (children). Love is the mechanism that makes the commitment credible — because it's not a rational calculation, it can't be easily defected from by rational calculation. That's a feature, not a bug.
So Pascal was exactly right — but for the wrong reason. He thought the heart's reasons were beyond reason. The tetrad says they're beneath it — deeper, faster, more computationally sophisticated than propositional thought, not less. The non-propositional isn't the non-physical or the non-computational. It's the pre-conscious. And the CS lens is precisely the tool that captures what the economics lens — with its assumption of deliberate optimization — misses.
This connects directly to the Simplicity Tax from my first post in this series. Those binary option traders weren't reasoning about simplicity. Their brains were processing the simpler product more fluently and delivering the result as a preference. Love works the same way — it's not a conclusion. It's a fast evaluation running on hardware that predates language by a hundred million years.
I have to disagree. The fact that you can imagine something that is in conflict with the laws of physics does not mean they don’t apply. Your dreaming, as we’ve seen over and over again, is electrical activity in the brain. Everything you think is, demonstrably, electrical activity in the brain.
Certainly interesting although I struggle with the concepts a lot.
Beauty arises from more than low computational cost. A blank sheet of paper has low computational cost but is not beautiful. Beauty exists in the space between chaos and order and is an emergent property greater than the sum of its parts.
On love there is a lot to respond to but on the physics that is obviously an extremely materalist view (cf. maya). On economics, humans are the exception with most mammals making no commitment to mating partners. On CS, I think you’re saying it is a logical deduction but you aren't conscious of it. Whatever that is, I'm not sure you can call it reason / logic or prove or disprove its existence. Kahneman has done plenty of work to show whatever that thinking is, it is far from logical.
All of the major religions talk about the greatest truths being outside the real of intellectualism. You’ll know Pascal himself had such an experience and spoke about a God “not of the philosophers and the scholars”.
These are genuinely good pushbacks — let me take them one at a time, because I think each one actually strengthensthe tetrad rather than weakening it.
The blank paper objection is exactly right, and I was imprecise. Beauty isn't low computational cost — it's high compression ratio. A blank page has low cost but carries no information. Noise has high information but can't be compressed. Beauty lives where you said it does: between chaos and order, where the stimulus carries a lot of information but your brain can encode it cheaply. That's what makes a Bach fugue beautiful and a blank page boring — the fugue is compressible but not trivially so. You nailed the correction. I should have been more careful.
On materialism and maya. I know the maya tradition well — I grew up with it. But notice what the tetrad is doing: it's not saying love is neurochemistry. It's saying neurochemistry is the physics lens on love. Maya would be a claim that the physics lens is the only real lens and everything else is illusion. The tetrad says the opposite: you need all four lenses and none of them reduces to any other. The neurochemistry is real and the felt experience is real and the game-theoretic structure is real. They're different views of the same phenomenon. That's actually closer to Advaita Vedanta than to materialism — multiple levels of description, none privileged.
On mammalian pair bonding. Fair point, but slightly overstated — wolves, gibbons, prairie voles, and quite a few other mammals form lasting pair bonds. Humans aren't as exceptional as they seem. The more interesting point is whypair bonding evolves when it does: it tracks the length of offspring dependency. Human children are helpless for years. That's a physics constraint (brain size, narrow birth canal, long development) driving an economic solution (sustained cooperation). The tetrad predicts pair bonding should appear wherever offspring dependency is long — and it does.
On Kahneman and unconscious processing. Here I think the disagreement is about the word "logical." You're absolutely right that System 1 isn't doing formal propositional logic. But I never said it was. I said it's computation — which is a much broader category. A neural network that integrates hundreds of signals and outputs a feeling is computing, even though it's not reasoning in syllogisms. Kahneman's whole point is that System 1 is fast, parallel, and often remarkably accurate — it just isn't verbal or propositional. That's exactly what the CS lens captures: processing that is real and effective but not accessible to introspection. Calling it "illogical" because it doesn't look like a philosophy seminar undersells what the brain is actually doing.
On Pascal and the God "not of the philosophers." I know the Mémorial well. The experience Pascal describes on the night of November 23, 1654 — the fire, the certainty, the tears of joy — is exactly the kind of phenomenon the tetrad is designed to handle. His experience was real. The neurochemistry was real. The felt certainty was real. What the tetrad asks is: what kind of real? If the laws of physics are exceptionless (which I argued in the https://samirvarma.substack.com/p/the-tetrad?r=hfb1h), then Pascal's experience was generated by his brain under specific conditions — fasting, sleep deprivation, intense intellectual crisis. That doesn't make it less meaningful to Pascal. It means the experience is best understood through the CS lens (what computation was his brain running?) rather than the physics lens (what chemicals were involved?) or the economics lens (what was he optimizing for?). The religions are right that the deepest experiences transcend intellectualism. The tetrad agrees! The CS lens is precisely the lens that captures non-propositional processing. It's the lens for things your brain does that you can't put into words. That's not beyond the tetrad — that's the tetrad's third quadrant doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Changing from low computational cost to high compression ratio creates a new problem of what constitutes ‘information’. There is no information in Bach. As Walter Pater put it “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” precisely because music just is. If you define ‘information’ as 0s and 1s on an MP3 file then Bach can contain the same information / bytes as white noise.
If you need all four lenses to understand a phenomenon and one of those lenses has an extremely materialist viewpoint then the combination of four must have extreme materialism built-in? Or it otherwise faces internal contradictions? Advaita vedanta has many lenses but none of them have materialism built-in (if anything, the many lenses are to help prove the exact opposite of materialism).
You state the laws of physics are exceptionless. That isn’t true in dreams. Does that mean dreams are not real? You might say that the dream really happened but it wasn’t real, in which case what is reality? There is rich history of dreams as test cases in Buddhism (‘awakening’). A similar argument is that Shakespeare is not true but expresses the greatest truths. Physics being exceptionless depends on which plane you are referring to (again back to maya which I knew you’d be familiar with!) That’s before you even touch the hard problem of consciousness.
The distinction between ‘logic’ and ‘computation’ is helpful but quite the stretch to think that this fine distinction is sufficient to explain the God “not of the philosophers or the scholars” which Pascal was referring to. Indeed, immediately before he refers to “GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob”. This is more like the distinction between mythos and logos which is not captured in the difference between logic and computation.
How does the tetrad reach the conclusion that slavery is wrong? Or to forgive the person who murdered your mother? Or that to serve the poorest is the highest calling? These are all questions of which way to orient yourself. Whatever you put in the highest place is God for you. The tetrad doesn’t seem to make any claim to orientation (i.e. the is-ought problem). The economics lens will often lead to an ‘is’ which is repulsive to ‘ought’ (e.g. slavery).
Appreciate your good-natured engagement 😊