Interviewing the dead Albert Einstein about free will

by Jon Rappoport

September 24, 2021

(To join our email list, click here.)

Note: I wrote this piece as an introduction to the scientific tyranny which has overtaken us: the premise that we are machines, and we can be decoded and transformed by genetics.

This is a lie on every possible level.

For many people, their first taste of this insanity is the COVID vaccine—a genetic treatment. However, that treatment comes out of the conviction that life is “mechanism.”

For 35 years, I’ve been waging war against this conviction. I continue to do so—not because I have some quirky mystical alternative, but because FREEDOM VERSUS THE MACHINE is the Big One, the big battlefield under the surface of our civilization.

I’m talking about today, tomorrow, the next hundred, the next five hundred years.

OK, here we go—a piece of fiction to make the truth known:


It was a strange journey into the astral realm to find Albert Einstein.

I slipped through gated communities heavily guarded by troops protecting dead Presidents. I skirted alleys where wannabe demons claiming they were Satan’s reps were selling potions made from powdered skulls of English kings. I ran through mannequin mansions where trainings for future shoppers were in progress. Apparently, some souls come to Earth to be born as aggressive entitled consumers. Who knew?

Finally, in a little valley, I spotted a cabin, and there on the porch, sitting in a rocker, smoking a pipe and reading The Bourne Ultimatum, was Dr. Einstein.

He was wearing an old sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows, jeans, and furry slippers.

I wanted to talk with the great man because I’d read a 1929 Saturday Evening Post interview with him. He’d said:

“I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will…Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act as if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.”

Dr, Einstein went inside and brought out two bottles of cold beer and we began our conversation:

Q: Sir, would you say that the underlying nature of physical reality is atomic?

A: If you’re asking me whether atoms and smaller particles exist everywhere in the universe, then of course, yes.

Q: And are you satisfied that, wherever they are found, they are the same? They exhibit a uniformity?

A: Surely, yes.

Q: Regardless of location.

A: Correct.

Q: So, for example, if we consider the make-up of the brain, those atoms are no different in kind from atoms wherever in the universe they are found.

A: That’s true. The brain is composed entirely of these tiny particles. And the particles, everywhere in the universe, without exception, flow and interact and collide without any exertion of free will. It’s an unending stream of cause and effect.

Q: And when you think to yourself, “I’ll get breakfast now,” what is that?

A: The thought?

Q: Yes.

A: Ultimately, it is the outcome of particles in motion.

Q: You were compelled to have that thought.

A: As odd as that may seem, yes. Of course, we tell ourselves stories to present ourselves with a different version of reality, but those stories are social or cultural constructs.

Q: And those “stories” we tell ourselves—they aren’t freely chosen rationalizations, either. We have no choice about that.

A: Well, yes. That’s right.

Q: So there is nothing in the human brain that allows us the possibility of free will.

A: Nothing at all.

Q: And as we are sitting here right now, sir, looking at each other, sitting and talking, this whole conversation is spooling out in the way that it must. Every word. Neither you nor I is really choosing what we say.

A: I may not like it, but yes, it’s deterministic destiny. The particles flow.

Q: When you pause to consider a question I ask you…even that act of considering is mandated by the motion of atomic and sub-atomic particles. What appears to be you deciding how to give me an answer…that is a delusion.

A: The act of considering? Why, yes, that, too, would have to be determined. It’s not free. There really is no choice involved.

Q: And the outcome of this conversation, whatever points we may or may not agree upon, and the issues we may settle here, about this subject of free will versus determinism…they don’t matter at all, because, when you boil it down, the entire conversation was determined by our thoughts, which are nothing more than atomic and sub-atomic particles in motion—and that motion flows according to laws, none of which have anything to do with human choice.

A: The entire flow of reality, so to speak, proceeds according to determined sets of laws. Yes.

Q: And we are in that flow.

A: Most certainly we are.

Q: The earnestness with which we might try to settle this issue, our feelings, our thoughts, our striving—that is irrelevant. It’s window dressing. This conversation actually cannot go in different possible directions. It can only go in one direction.

A: That would ultimately have to be so.

Q: Now, are atoms and their components, and any other tiny particles in the universe…are any of them conscious?

A: Of course not. The particles themselves are not conscious.

Q: Some scientists speculate they are.

A: Some people speculate that the moon can be sliced and served on a plate with fruit.

Q: What do you think “conscious” means?

A: It means we participate in life. We take action. We converse. We gain knowledge.

Q: Any of the so-called faculties we possess—are they ultimately anything more than particles in motion?

A: Well, no, they aren’t. Because everything is particles in motion. What else could be happening in this universe? Nothing.

Q: All right. I’d like to consider the word “understanding.”

A: It’s a given. It’s real.

Q: How so?

A: The proof that it’s real, if you will, is that we are having this conversation. It makes sense to us.

Q: Yes, but how can there be understanding if everything is particles in motion? Do the particles possess understanding?

A: No they don’t.

Q: To change the focus just a bit, how can what you and I are saying have any meaning?

A: Words mean things.

Q: Again, I have to point out that, in a universe with no free will, we only have particles in motion. That’s all. That’s all we are. So where does “meaning” come from?

A: “We understand language” is a true proposition.

Q: You’re sure.

A: Of course.

Q: Then I suggest you’ve tangled yourself in a contradiction. In the universe you depict, there would be no room for understanding. Or meaning. There would be nowhere for it to come from. Unless particles understand. Do they?

A: No.

Q: Then where do “understanding” and “meaning” come from?

A: [Silence.]

Q: Furthermore, sir, if we accept your depiction of a universe of particles, then there is no basis for this conversation at all. We don’t understand each other. How could we?

A: But we do understand each other.

Q: And therefore, your philosophic materialism (no free will, only particles in motion) must have a flaw.

A: What flaw?

Q: Our existence contains more than particles in motion.

A: More? What would that be?

Q: Would you grant that whatever it is, it is non-material?

A: It would have to be, but…

Q: Then, driving further along this line, there is something non-material which is present, which allows us to understand each other, which allows us to comprehend meaning. We are conscious. Puppets are not conscious. As we sit here talking, I understand you. Do you understand me?

A: Of course.

Q: Then that understanding is coming from something other than particles in motion. Without this non-material quality, you and I would be gibbering in the dark.

A: You’re saying that, if all the particles in the universe, including those that make up the brain, possess no consciousness, no understanding, no comprehension of meaning, no freedom, then how can they give birth to understanding and freedom. There must be another factor, and it would have to be non-material.

Q: Yes. That’s what I’m saying. And I think you have to admit your view of determinism and particles in motion—that picture of the universe—leads to several absurdities.

A: Well…perhaps I’m forced to consider it. Otherwise, we can’t sit here and understand each other.

Q: You and I do understand each other.

A: I hadn’t thought it through this way before, but if there is nothing inherent in particles that gives rise to understanding and meaning, then everything is gibberish. Except it isn’t gibberish. Yes, I seem to see a contradiction. Interesting.

Q: And if these non-material factors—understanding and meaning—exist, then other non-material factors can exist.

A: For example, freedom. I suppose so.

Q: And the drive to eliminate freedom in the world…is more than just the attempt to substitute one automatic reflex for another.

A: That would be…yes, that would be so.

Q: Scientists would be absolutely furious about the idea that, despite all their maneuvering, the most essential aspects of human life are beyond the scope of what they, the scientists, are “in charge of.”

A: It would be a naked challenge to the power of science.

Einstein puffed on his pipe and looked out over the valley. He took a sip of his beer. After a minute, he said, “Let me see if I can summarize this, because it’s really rather startling. The universe is nothing but particles. All those particles follow laws of motion. They aren’t free. The brain is made up entirely of those same particles. Therefore, there is nothing in the brain that would give us freedom. These particles also don’t understand anything, they don’t make sense of anything, they don’t grasp the meaning of anything. Since the brain, again, is made up of those particles, it has no power to allow us to grasp meaning or understand anything. But we do understand. We do grasp meaning. Therefore, we are talking about qualities we possess which are not made out of energy. These qualities are entirely non-material.”

He nodded.

“In that case,” he said, “there is…oddly enough, a completely different sphere or territory. It’s non-material. Therefore, it can’t be measured. Therefore, it has no beginning or end. If it did, it would be a material continuum and we could measure it.”

He pointed to the valley.

“That has energy. But what does it give me? Does it allow me to be conscious? Does it allow me to be free, to understand meaning? No.”

Then he laughed. He looked at me.

“I’m dead,” he said, “aren’t I? I didn’t realize it until this very moment.”

I shook my head. “No. I would say you WERE dead until this moment.”

He grinned. “Yes!” he said. “That’s a good one. I WAS dead.”

He stood up.

“Enough of this beer,” he said. “I have some schnapps inside. Let me get it. Let’s drink the good stuff! After all, I’m apparently Forever. And so are you. And so are we all.”


Exit From the Matrix

(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, Exit From The Matrix, click here.)


Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

21 comments on “Interviewing the dead Albert Einstein about free will

  1. Sean says:

    Ive been clean and sober for 34 years. 1st stop Albert Einstein’s. Please don’t drink it all.

  2. Steve McNeal says:

    The sublime entertainment of the liberated mind is the best of all tools of liberation. I love it! Keep on keeping’ on, Jon!!!

  3. Frances Leader says:

    I like to assume that energy is eternal & therefore so is my essence.
    I loved your chat with Einstein…. it is a comfort to know that he has not suffered from entropy.

    • Leon says:

      All kinds of matter (down to and including protons) have been observed to have decayed, and matter can be interchanged with energy (the method is almost irrelevant) so even a hard-line Physicalist would be forced to admit that nothing limited to the physical (in rough terms, matter or energy) can have always existed.

      If absolutely nothing ever existed (and Krauss’ ‘nothing’ is not actually nothing) there would be no method available to alter that, so absolutely nothing would continue to exist indefinitely.

      You exist, I exist, so absolutely nothing has never existed.

      Reversing the polarity of that, some entity has always existed.

      Said entity cannot be limited to the physical.

      More than said entity now exists, so it is necessarily able to make other entities (including physical entities) and has done so.

  4. Robin Williams says:

    I’m honest about my limitations and admit them openly. For example, I have NO idea what the point of this article is. It seems as though it possesses a certain philosophical leaning….one without a punch line. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand it. I floated through an entire semester of philosophy and felt that the B I got was completely unearned and misguided, however, I was grateful I didn’t have to repeat it.

    • Benjamin Martin says:

      Perhaps the main point of the article is to suggest that via free will we can actually influence outcomes, instead of just believing that everything was inevitable from the start, regardless of whatever we might choose to do – an attitude more likely to encourage doing very little.

    • Benjamin Martin says:

      Might also suggest that the article is about how consciousness may not simply be ‘explained away’ as an intricate set of neural processes, which by order of complexity grant the ‘illusion’ of free will, and indeed, consciousness. (Hope my assumption is not too far off the mark, Jon?)

  5. Desmond McReynolds says:

    Einstein appears to be a patron saint. Of What? Some call him the Father of the Atom Bomb. In all their three or four thousand years in the Middle East deserts the Jews were busy living in tents and looking after their goats and sheep and camels. There were no Einsteins then.

    What did the Jews give to history? They gave us the Ten Commandments. They gave us the idea of One God when everyone else believed in various gods. But in all those thousands and thousands of years the Jews did not produce a single Einstein. A Moses yes, but no Einsteins. Einstein is a product of Europe; and that whole world and planet that has become an extension of Europe.

    Einstein is a product of Europe – the Greek Roman and Judeo-Christian Europe – and the whole world has become an extension of Europe – that same Europe that gave birth to the Copernicus and Galileo who claimed the Flat Earth Society had got it all wrong and that the earth was a planet floating in outer space.

    Europe was the only civilization that gave birth to an industrial revolution, that split the atom, that sent a man to the moon.

    The thousands and thousands of years in the desert gave the world the Ten Commandments and the idea of the One God instead of the gods of war and peace and food and drink etc etc.

    It was 2,000 years of Judeo Christianity that gave birth to our modern world. Judeo Christianity adopted Greek philosophy and logic and Roman law and jurisprudence and Jewish messianism and prophecy – Europe is not just Judeo Christianity but Europe is Greek Roman and Jew, a trilogy that no other civilization ever achieved. Modern man has a triple identity.

    And the meaning of history is simply the attempt of modern man to see himself as god, as the Supreme Being of the Universe, as was taught for centuries in the Lodge, ever since the French Revolution when man took centre stage and displaced God.

    Man is now in search of his own deity, his own godhead, his own divinity and seeks to challenge God Himself in his very heavens.
    That is the insanity of the modern world.

    That is why we are forced to believe there must be a devil, an evil principle, in charge of world history.

    • JA says:

      Oh yes, there is a devil in charge. A plethora of them….

      [Ed. note: please do not post broken links]

      Why doesn’t this become #1 in our concern about what? why? is our world careening toward hell on earth!

    • Myles says:

      2000? Let’s try 5000 years. And until the next oncoming any moment crustal displacement – the parasite clan will control the masses.

  6. RSBP says:

    Just a recap of a few key points:

    Q: And those “stories” we tell ourselves—they aren’t freely chosen rationalizations, either. We have no choice about that.
    A: Well, yes. That’s right.

    Q: So there is nothing in the human brain that allows us the possibility of free will.
    A: Nothing at all.

    Q: Scientists would be absolutely furious about the idea that, despite all their maneuvering, the most essential aspects of human life are beyond the scope of what they, the scientists, are “in charge of.”
    A: It would be a naked challenge to the power of science.

    I think the fury of scientists will be full blown pretty soon as they attempt to further their grip on humanity (or at least on the sub-hmanity they are controlling)

    Just a peak at what is ahead:

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/34AVwjWe8joH/

  7. Roundball Shaman says:

    “…FREEDOM VERSUS THE MACHINE is the Big One, the big battlefield under the surface of our civilization.”

    Human beings as a life force are not machines. In fact, human beings don’t even really have bodies at all. Nor is anything else in the Universe of solid ‘substance’.

    Quantum physics has revealed that everything at its most basic is swirling energy potentials that take form when Observed. Change what you Observe, and you change the energy forms around you that appear as solid things. But they are STILL ENERGY.

    So in reality, humans can never lose the ‘battle’ between being a machine/thing and what we truly are. We can’t lose the battle on the level of how things really exist. We will always be energy and nothing but energy.

    But what we CAN do (and what the Dark Powers are trying damn hard to do) is to
    delude and convince ourselves and treat ourselves AS IF we were just machines. To be clear, we STILL would not be machines but we would fall victim to a grand delusion and lie that we were such. Energy forms such as humans cannot change their basic substance to turn from energy to machine. But humans can convince themselves to conform to a big lie if they so choose (as humans have done for thousands of years… lies that are treated as truths but which never will be).

    In fact, we all know that Lies are what hold our current social and political World together as currently constituted. We exist in a hall of mirrored lies spun by dark wizards with dark selfish agendas.

    Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

    Of course this is true. But it also true that it can be said that Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, and counting on the SAME RESULTS. Keep spinning lies and pray that no one ever wakes up – the Same Result.

  8. Jerome Kelly says:

    It’s a mistake for me to think of meaning as a thing. The core reality, it now seems to me, is that people use language to mean their experience. When i am writing, i am meaning my experience. To go a step further and to now label this fundamental activity of meaning as a thing we call meaning is an error.

    It is true that everything exists. Even things that don’t exist do exist. Therefore God exists. Therefore meaning exists. But that meaning is not what we think it is, as i introduced earlier up there ^^^.

    Consider the meaning of life compared to the meaning of a word. Different sense of meaning. Both different from the forgotten meaning of meaning, which is actually a doing with language.

    What is the meaning of that word? What is the running of that leg? What is the walking of that mile? Similar questions, fairly equally astray.

    Now, to recast the Einstein dialogue… 😉

  9. Benjamin Martin says:

    A very eloquent piece of ‘freewheeling’, if I may say. I fancy that Einstein harboured plenty of doubt relating to his publicly-held ‘convictions’. Yet – he was a man passionately dedicated to theory as an Art in its own right, and I don’t doubt that for him – and, at the deepest level – Art took prime of place. He was an artist by temperament.

    Here’s a very short, ‘pocket’ Treble Makers argument on the Necker Cube, which has a deterministic ring about it, it’s true, but then again, one may consciously ‘direct’ or ‘will’ their shifting perspective from one viewpoint to the other of the cube, in which event it may be that our world is literally defined by a struggle between very real forces known as ‘free will’ and ‘determinism’: https://www.facebook.com/thefirebirdtrio/posts/1975010982676193

  10. Benjamin Martin says:

    I should have added that I’m fairly certain Einstein – insofar as he was a determinist – would have believed that life was an unfolding narrative of God’s design, and that such a design was fundamentally unknowable (and that too perhaps an aspect by design).

  11. vakzine macht frei says:

    Short exercise to get in touch with your consciousness…

    Relax, with your eyes closed. Watch your thoughts. do not try to control them. just watch with good concentration. after few minutes ask the question: “what will be next though? ” At that moment thoughts will stop. Concentrate on empty space left. Do not let another thought to arise. You are now in a state of consciousness but your mind is stopped. If done right, you will feel a huge energy, happiness…

    Next step would be to reach the state with eyes open.. next step is to do it instantly

  12. senorena peepers says:

    Deepak Chopra delved into the consciousness outside of the biological. This is so perfectly aligned to his writings.

    I am so thrilled to be finally getting a glimpse. Thank you.

  13. Arby says:

    “FREEDOM VERSUS THE MACHINE is the Big One”

    It’s a big one, for sure.

    I have my opinion about what the Big One is. I say it’s “The Issue Of Universal Sovereignty.” Note, those two big ones are connected.

    TIOUS – […]

  14. Brodie says:

    […] before you try to even begin to tear down the idea that there is no free will, why don’t you address how much better society would be if people understood that there is no free will? There would be far more compassion for the less fortunate and the violent than there is today. People would realize that the poor are poor for no fault of their own. The ego of the wealthy would be gone, because they would realize that they were just lucky. People would want to help each other much more. But those such as yourself like to keep attacking the idea that there is no free will, which is simply the idea that humans are somehow special and our actions and thoughts are not dictated by the laws of physics.

    “Then where do “understanding” and “meaning” come from?” Computer programs can understand and glean meaning. Do they now magically have free will? Same with animals. Do they now magically have free will?

    “Then, driving further along this line, there is something non-material which is present, which allows us to understand each other, which allows us to comprehend meaning. We are conscious. Puppets are not conscious.” Why bring up puppets? Why not bring up computer programs and animals instead? Oh yeah, that completely invalidates your points.

    You really should check out

    https://breakingthefreewillillusion.com/

    and learn more about the subject.

    Again, advocating for free will is advocating for a society that has no compassion for the poor and downtrodden and advocates for egos for the successful.

Leave a Reply to Arby Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *