Excerpt — Foreword & Chapter 1 (opening)

If everything is caused, how can change be real? This book offers a third path beyond “magic free will” and resignation: direction under constraints. The claim is not that choices are uncaused; it is that certain systems acquire a new kind of cause — self-revision — that reshapes what they do next.

We usually talk about “free will” as either metaphysical magic or a comforting illusion. Both options miss the interesting middle. A system can be fully causal and still become self-directing when parts of it learn to revise the rules by which it operates. Freedom then isn’t escape from causation; it’s a change in which causes matter.

Chapter 1 — Layered Agency. At the base are habits and reflexes: scripts that run without supervision. Above them sits a layer that can edit those scripts. The practical question is not “Are my choices uncaused?” but “Which rule updates are possible from here?” When we focus on rule updates, responsibility stops being a metaphysical burden and becomes a design problem: shaping incentives, norms, and practices that make better updates more likely.

This is why compassion and responsibility are not opposites. If direction is the goal, then blame is often a bad tool; better tools are feedback, affordances, and environments that help agents revise themselves. In complex systems — people, teams, institutions — progress looks like recursion: iterating on the rules that shape future iterations.

Freedom, on this view, is not randomness. It is rule-revision inside constraints. The rest of this book maps how that works in practice — and how to design for it.