This world is a simulation—not in the cheap sense of a video game someone is playing, but in the deeper sense that reality is an information-processing system. Embedded within it are programs and algorithms. What we call living things do not ultimately govern themselves. A layer of rules does.
A bacterium lives, survives, and reproduces. This is not because the bacterium understands survival or has taken it on as a conscious task. It follows instructions. Above the organism is a layer of software: rules, constraints, and optimization pressures, shaped so that, generation after generation, the bacterium persists and reproduces.
Evolution, from this perspective, is not primarily the story of organisms inventing themselves. It is the story of governing software being progressively shaped until it reliably produces an algorithm capable of maintaining and reproducing living organisms. The organism is the execution point. Updates in the software are what is being selected.
That may also explain why artificial intelligence is possible in this world at all. The simulation was already structured so that software could evolve: systems of rules could be tuned toward objectives, and information-processing systems could become increasingly capable of sustaining and generating further information-processing. AI is therefore not necessarily an alien intrusion into nature. It may be another instance of a pattern the world already contains.
We never directly see the laws of physics. We see their manifestations: force, radiation, current, motion, and changes in energy. Electromagnetism is not an object sitting somewhere in the room. We infer it from what happens when things interact.
Quantum mechanics makes the point sharper. A particle does not broadcast a complete set of properties—mass, spin, momentum, temperature—as though it were a labeled object displaying its specifications. We obtain measurement outcomes through interactions with other particles, fields, or measuring systems. What we observe are outcomes produced by underlying rules under particular conditions, not a complete inventory of an independently displayed object.
Living organisms can be viewed in the same way. We observe a bacterium moving toward nutrients, avoiding harm, dividing, and exchanging chemicals. We do not have to assume that the bacterium contains a little inner agent that has chosen survival as its personal project. Those behaviors are what its machinery produces when it operates. An entity can be understood as the execution point of processes it did not ultimately author. This makes the absence of libertarian free will much easier to conceptualize.
“I chose” can still be true at the level of the person. The choice is a real event occurring within a real system. What would not be true, under this framework, is that the person was an uncaused origin of that choice, standing independently outside genetics, development, environment, prior states, and the deeper rule-layers beneath them.
AI provides a useful analogy. It can select one response rather than another, but it does not independently create the architecture, training process, objectives, or information that made that selection possible. The agency is real as a process occurring within the system; it is not an independent first cause.
Whenever we encounter something that appears purposeful, the first question is this: what rules underneath it produce this appearance of wanting?
We do not see the source code. We see interactions. From those interactions, we infer the rules.