We Die Because We Have Will
Escape Velocity. A thermodynamic theory of the self.
Me ≈ W ⊗ T
(I’ll come back to this.)
For years, I was obsessed with a specific bug in the ‘human operating system’.
Newton explained the falling apple. Copernicus proved we aren’t the center of the universe. Einstein showed us that space and time are just geometry.
But they all skipped the User: Me.
Why do we have a Will? Why do we have Consciousness? And above all, Why do we die?
This didn’t just annoy me; it haunted me. Since I was a boy, I watched religion, science, and philosophy fighting for root access to the truth. But their explanations were siloed. They were proprietary patches that didn’t talk to each other. Stubborn as I was, I realized no one was going to give me the manual. I had to reverse-engineer it myself.
Then, at 20, the floor dropped out.
I went through a trauma that didn’t just break me; it formatted the drive. It shattered everything I thought was true. It stripped the paint off the walls and forced me to stare at the structural beams of reality.
That was the moment I stopped taking humanity seriously. Not in a nihilistic way, but in an engineering way. I stopped looking at the “Interface” and started looking at the “Schematic.”
I threw myself into engineering. I became obsessed with linearity, non-linearity, and modeling uncertainty. But I didn’t see it as cold arithmetic. I saw it as Art. It was a language capable of capturing the vibration of the world better than poetry ever could.
One day, after an intense session of math, I looked out the window and the pattern clicked.
If math is just a model of reality, then words are just low-resolution variables. And if they are just variables... I can bend them.
The Attachment Menu
Take “Addiction”, “Desire”, or “Habit”. These are just different words for the same mechanical force: Attachment.
It acts like gravity. It pulls. The more you repeat a behavior, the stronger the pull becomes; eventually it reaches a stable orbit.
Where does this come from?
Rewind to the caveman. His “Attachment Menu” was small. Sharpen a stick, throw a stone, have sex. There was no “Write a Substack”. There was no “Doomscroll”.
But generation after generation, we accumulated these chains of attachment. Culture, knowledge, experience. We built an “Attachment Menu” so large that we created entire industries around it, completely detached from the physics that governs it.
I kept pushing on this. Why do we accumulate? Why do we have Will?
And then I realized the mistake we’ve all been making. We are Copernican Traumatized. We think we are “Things” placed in the Universe.
We are not things. We are Systems.
The Physics of Being
If you want to understand Death, you have to stop looking at Biology; you have to start looking at Thermodynamics.
Imagine the universe is a sea of Lego bricks floating randomly. Now, imagine constant energy flowing through that sea.
From time to time, the energy pushes the bricks into a shape. The shape holds for a moment, forcing the energy to flow through it in a specific pattern. Billions of years pass. The shapes get more complex. Amino acids. Proteins. Cells. Organs. You.
The “Structure” changes, but the energy flow is constant.
You are not the Bricks. You are the energy flowing through increasingly constrained structures.
This makes you a Process, not an Object. And this is where the tragedy begins. To maintain this complex shape, you have to constrain more and more of the flow. You have to accumulate Mass.
The Mass
This is why we get attached. We don’t just “learn”; we absorb.
You cannot un-see. You cannot un-experience. What you experience is Irreversible. That irreversibility is Mass.
We die because we cannot sustain the Mass.
Thermodynamics is clear: every complex system degrades. Errors accumulate. DNA replication is noisy. We call this “Aging”, but an engineer calls it “Compounding Error”. The Telomeres are just a buffer; an extra life in Super Mario. But eventually, the Entropy wins.
So why did evolution build us to die?
This is where Loss Aversion finally made sense to me. We feel losses more heavily than wins because Loss behaves like Gravity.
To predict the future (Will), you need a record of the past (Mass). But if you accumulate Mass, you create Inertia. And if you have Inertia, you eventually cannot turn the ship.
We die because we have Will. We have Will because we have Mass. We have Mass because we die.
It is a closed loop.
We are open thermodynamic loops that survive by capturing information in our physical structure. This structure allows us to act (Will), but eventually, the structure becomes so rigid and filled with the physical residue of past survival (Mass) that it can no longer process new energy. We calcify into our own history.
The Formula
This led me to conclude that there is no single “Me”. There are two.
Me₁ (The Internal): The Mass. The Pull. The Irreversible Memory. The Biological Anchor.
Me₂ (The Relative): The Construct. The Social Graph. The Node in the Network.
The “Sense of Self” is the interference pattern between them. It is the friction of the Social Graph trying to move the Heavy Mass.
Or, formally:
me(t+1) = (W ⊗ T) · g(t)
Where:
W = World-Loop (The Spatial Boundary: Act → Sense → Adjust)
T = Time-Loop (The Mass: Accumulate → Constrain → Persist)
⊗ = Bidirectional Coupling (Entanglement)
And g(t)? That is the most important variable.
The Pulse
The Will - g(t) - is not a “thing”. It is a Pulse.
The world is high entropy; chaos. To exist as a structure, we must pump that entropy out of our system. We are like Miners digging a tunnel. We dig the chaos out (Will) so the energy flow can move through us.
But you cannot run a pump at 100% capacity forever. It overheats.
The Will must breathe.
Systole (Push): We lower entropy. We assert. We dig. Diastole (Rest): We raise entropy. We accept. We rest.
This explains why we sleep.
When you sleep, g(t) approaches zero.
The machinery (W ⊗ T) is still there, but the Miner has stopped digging.
When g(t) ≈ 0, the Will is silent.
The self persists as inertia, not motion.
Good night.