Proponents of Free Will Synchronize Themselves

Here at Network Address, sociothermodynamics is a common topic; it's the idea that people, despite the illusion of control, behave like particles, bouncing around, and according to the very basic physical laws of thermodynamics.

The most obvious manifestation of this is synchronization, introduced in the above paper like this: "Many seemingly unrelated systems which exhibit repetitive behaviors, such as clocks, pacemaker cells in the heart, or a swarm of pulsing fireflies, are seen to undergo transitions from initial randomness to an ordered state." (Read more from the texts referenced below.)

The seemingly random intersections of all our lives are governed by the same rules that synchronize fireflies. This is why we can predict the gross domestic product of a city by how fast its people walk on its sidewalks. You can call up your free will and ask him to help you overturn this law, but he can't help. You're better off calling someone at the Santa Fe Institute; at least they can explain it for you. 

Image credit: Pulse Topology - Rafael Lozano-Hemmer at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art - Jul 2021

From flashing fireflies to cheering crowds: Physicists unlock secret to synchronisation

Dec 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-12-fireflies-crowds-physicists-secret-synchronisation.html

This paper is exciting, not because it made the top headlines at the New York Times when it came out, but because of what they found at the bottom of all this: "This model may be derived from the complex Ginzburg-Landau equations for a lattice of driven-dissipative Bose-Einstein condensates of exciton polaritons."

That's right, Bose-Einstein condensates, which should make you think about quantum things, and even things metaphysical, like Zipf's Law, or Serpinski's Triangles. So not only are we a bunch of particles bouncing around, but quantum particles at that. 

via Trinity College Dublin: John P. Moroney et al, Synchronization in disordered oscillator lattices: Nonequilibrium phase transition for driven-dissipative bosons, Physical Review Research (2021). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.043092

http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.043092

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Notes: 

A. Pikovskij, M. Rosenblum, and J. Kurths, Synchronization: A Universal Concept in Nonlinear Sciences, 1st ed., Cambridge Nonlinear Science Series No. 12 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003).

S. H. Strogatz, From Kuramoto to Crawford: Exploring the onset of synchronization in populations of coupled oscillators, Physica D 143, 1 (2000).