According to a thesis of Donald McKay, a Scottish cyberneticist or information theorist, freedom arises under these conditions: Even if complex systems were machines and completely determined, each system would have to assume that the other can be influenced, i.e. reacts to signals, and this not in a way whose determinacy could be calculated in the system itself, but precisely in a way that is unpredictable.
Therefore, you have to sweeten the information, so to speak, you have to offer incentives that you believe or know from experience that the other systems will get involved, that they will cooperate voluntarily, based on their own preferences, or, if you want to rule that out, that they will not cooperate, that they can therefore decide and are not already through-determined systems that do what they do anyway.
The interesting hypothesis is that freedom comes from duplication of systems from determinacy. They must be more than one system, and they must be complexity inferior, that is, they must not have Requisite Variety. They must interact and must fake freedom in order to be able to bring themselves into a relationship with another system. When this happens on both sides, freedom qua fiction becomes reality.
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Luhmann, Einführung in die Systemtheorie, p. 178