Determinism

By Mihir Ramchandani / Spring 2026

It's late; maybe one, maybe two. My desk light is turned off, and the only light in the room is the piercing blue glow coming from my ROG Zephyrus G14, and it washes over my fingers as I type on the keyboard. The house is silent, save for the white noise coming from the hum of the fridge down the hallway in the kitchen. I know that I have to go to school tomorrow, but I really couldn’t care less. I’m currently reading Wikipedia articles in a rabbit hole where I’ve completely lost track of what I originally looked for.

I clicked on the blue hyperlink, and the article loaded. The title reads: Determinism.

I read the first paragraph and then I read it again. It isn't some grand moment - no gasp, no leaning back in my chair, rather it is simply the sensation of understanding something. The sensation of recognizing a word you understand in a foreign language. I had the idea floating around inside of my head for quite a while, loose and without a name, and here it was on a computer screen in front of me, explained in simple text with footnotes and subheadings.

As I understood it that night, the basic premise was that everything that occurs follows directly from whatever occurred previously. All events, reactions, and decisions are caused by some previous event, reaction or decision. Physics underlies everything: atoms move the way they move because physics dictates their movement, neurons fire based upon chemical reactions. If you were able to go back in time to any point and replay the universe, the same series of events would occur, just as if it was a movie tape. The same individuals would make the same choices. Not because they’re weak or unthinking, but because there is no possible alternate version. The equation has only one solution.

The next day, something is different. Not the world, but the way I view it.

In school today, I couldn't stop reading. It was like someone gave me a new pair of glasses that I could not remove - they didn't make anything clearer, they stripped everything back to the wiring beneath. I watch a guy three rows in front of me shift in his seat and instead of seeing a person who is uncomfortable in his seat, I see the causal chain: years of the same body position shaping his spine, the mild hunger he ate breakfast too quickly to sate, and the anxiety signal his amygdala has been quietly sending him for years because of some unknown event from when he was younger - all resulting in this single seat shift, as inevitable as a mathematical proof. I see the underlying code driving everything.

It should be empowering. It wasn't.

It felt like being on the wrong side of a sheet of glass looking in on everyone moving comfortably in a warm space I left.

The longer I follow each chain back to generations of causality preceding each minor action - an infinite progression of dominoes set before we even existed - the less I feel alive and the more I feel like something observing life. I have discovered the source code of the simulator and I can't stop reading it. The simulator continues to run perfectly. I have glitched outside of it.

Walking home alone today I followed threads. Each person is a string unwinding back to the origin of everything and I'm viewing them all as a ghost.

I stopped at a corner that I cross daily. I looked at my hand.

Something settled. These neurons firing to keep these fingers still. This specific configuration of carbon that has learned to read, to think... that happened upon a Wikipedia article at 1 AM. I followed back as I did throughout most of the day; however, this time the causal chain belonged to me. I stopped at this corner because I got lost in thought. Lost because of what I read last night. Read it because I clicked a link from a rabbit hole that started somewhere I have long forgotten; started somewhere before that; started before I was born.

I was not viewing the equation from the outside. I never was.

There is no ghost. There is no outside. The glass I had been pushing my face up against all day - I'm on the same side as everybody else.

Underneath my feet, I have walked this cracked sidewalk countless times, was always supposed to be here at this very second. And every molecule of smoke wafting past me was always meant to pass through me.

I begin walking. My footsteps sound exactly like they always do. I don't feel separated from the world anymore. I feel like I am made of it.