...

This is going to get very messy, very fast.

Imagine for me a Monad of sorts, a truly undeterminable thing comparable to nothing itself in raw incomprehensibility. Prior to all things matter, all things defined, there was an abyssal void of all definition with all that we call alive centralized in one single area. We are all children of this Monad, all expressing will in an undetermined form through a deterministic medium such as matter. The water we swim within has perfect memory, all of its waves and particles potentially traceable to their very origin, but what the water cannot express is the human intention behind swimming within it. Why would the person swim one way and not another? It's undetermined at present but eternally recorded. We have so many quantum elements about us that are impossible to calculate with the human mind alone, factors in each dice roll, but we can record every face the dice lands on.

So, picture free will for me. There's this pair of dice with infinite sides, and at any point you might try to roll it or poke it onto an adjacent face or even abruptly stop it with your hand as it rolls. For an outside observer they cannot observe your hand, they don't know whether or not you play a role in what face the dice ultimately culminates in. To them the dice land on one face or another for some reason or another. Think for a moment... what do you mean when you say "or another" when you say "for some reason or another"? Another reason that you haven't determined perhaps? Surely randomness itself is possibly among the superpositioned 'another' that you refuse to personally determine. It's got infinite potential, minus your contribution because you determine it to be potentially false.

Imagine a machine that can take a perfect snapshot of every bit of data at a present moment. Literally everything there is to know at one moment in time is stored within this machine. At some point after that the machine takes yet another snapshot of its present moment. As a machine of infinite intelligence it is aware of every potential interaction, down to the quantum level, so it simulates every possible random outcome from between the first and second snapshots until it recreates a complete replica of every bit of data in the second snapshot. You might imagine that with such a machine one might be able to have perfect knowledge of every event that came between the first and second snapshot... but that doesn't account for two or more random events that may result in the same outcome. There is seemingly infinite potential for it to have simulated an alternate timeline.

If it were to know every single outcome of every single event then it might be able to simulate a variety of potential timelines, but on the basis of all that data alone it would be impossible for the machine to truly know what happened... unless the machine were to have lived it itself by making snapshots at every moment in-between. This seems to be a solid reason for life as we know it, maybe even for dreams as well. Maybe even for death? All of those potential timelines are only ever experienced because the machine absolutely had to, because it didn't make snapshots of every moment in-between. Hard to say from here... I suppose if I could say from here then it would have lost all its magic, wouldn't it? Like a spoiled plot point for a story or something. One study said that spoilers make some books even more entertaining though...

Anyways, yeah. It is what it is, and it's going to be whatever it's going to be.