Frames of Thought – The Puppet Master

Who Controls Your Life?

Frames of Thought: Eleven

The Frames of Thought series of essays offers a scene-by-scene glimpse into my thoughts, motivations, hopes, backstories, struggles, and anything else that comes to mind as I create this animation.

Script Extract:

This allows us to transform ourselves from being marionettes yanked around by fate to being the puppet masters of our minds.

The Scene:

Puppets on a string is such a brilliant metaphor for the idea of free will.

When you watch a puppet show, there’s a moment when you get so caught up in the story—the life, the drama, the struggle of the puppet—that you stop noticing the strings altogether. At that moment, the puppet, in a funny sort of way, becomes free from the puppet master lurking behind the scenes.

Of course, the puppet is never truly free. We know that. But imagine, just for a moment, that the puppet had conscious awareness, the ability to think and feel emotions. It would become absorbed in the unfolding story of its life and experience its own behaviour as though it were free, making its own choices, following its own little puppet heart.

And so the puppet lives in two worlds at once—both equally real. The world of strings, and the world of experience. One is deterministic, and the other is free. And here’s the kicker: both are true at the same time.

In this clip, I’m advocating for becoming both the puppet and the puppet master. It’s not magic; it’s a matter of understanding the relationship between mind and matter. Once you see how the strings work, you don’t just dance—you pull the strings.

What Inspired This?

I’ve had a long and interesting journey with the concept of free will. Like most people, I started off not questioning its obvious validity. Of course, I had free will! I made daily decisions left, right, and centre, free from outside influence. Or so I thought. But when I took a closer look at free will, I discovered it wasn’t quite so cut and dry. What bothered me was that there was no explanation for the mechanism of free will — which was, in itself, a strange idea because even suggesting there was a mechanism implied it was causally driven.

If free will depends on a mechanism — whether neurological, psychological, or metaphysical — then that mechanism must be operating according to some kind of rules or principles. And if it’s following rules, well… how free can it really be? It seemed to me that either our choices were determined by prior causes — meaning they weren’t truly free — or they arose randomly, which also threw agency under the bus.

Eventually, I landed in the camp of hard determinism: there’s no such thing as free will. For a long time, I searched for counterarguments that actually made sense, something that could unravel determinism. But every argument I found? Ultimately, it's just hand waving and denial — more faith than facts.

Then, working with the new language of consciousness I’d been developing, I stumbled upon a simple structure — a mechanism. It was a perpetual, causal loop. And because it wasn’t based on matter, but on mind, there was no entropy involved — no energy loss — which meant, at least in theory, it could run forever.

Constructing and kickstarting the loop required determinism, sure. But once the first loop was completed, poof — all information about any external cause disappeared. It became a causeless cause, in other words, free. This perceptual causal loop, woven into the very mechanism driving intelligence and conscious awareness, provided a first-cause source for decision-making: free will.

Of course, it’s not as simple as slamming the book shut and declaring, “Free will wins!” It really meant that the sharp dividing line between free will and determinism wasn’t so sharp after all. The two could be seen as parts of a single causal flow system. After all, determinism is what hands free will the options to choose between — and the outcome of that choice, the whole deliberation process, is itself deterministic. But the mind does have a first-cause origin in that process, making it causally responsible.

Moral responsibility? That’s trickier. It depends on how you choose to view the integrated causal flow of events — either as a whole or in parts. Both perspectives are valid, but they lead to very different conclusions. Choosing which to apply, when, and for what reason? That takes wisdom.

The result of this new framework is that we can now seamlessly shift between being objective and subjective, holding both perspectives as valid at the same time. And that gives us unprecedented emotional control. When you’ve got that kind of fine-grained control over your emotions, you’re in full control of your state of mind. And that means better decisions, leading to better outcomes. You’re no longer some puppet on a string, yanked around by emotions and hidden mechanisms — you’re the puppet master, pulling the strings, running the show on the stage of life.

Behind the Scenes

Behind Flowmonics lies a unique language capable of describing both mind and matter, uniting them within a single framework. Simultaneously, this language offers significant insight into how the mind operates, including the nature of intelligence. I am currently working on the initial steps to determine whether its principles can be developed into a new type of AI system.

If successful, this new form of AI could address many of the challenges faced by current systems, such as achieving true understanding, reducing the cost of training, and improving the capacity to handle novelty. I will then use something like Replit, an online integrated development environment (IDE), to create a proof of concept.

That should be fun.