 Diderot is neither asserting total interconnection (as in Laplacian determinism) nor defending the existence of freedom to act as “indifference” or “agent causation”, but an intermediate view (once known as the Hume-Mill thesis) according to which what it is to be “me” is to be a particular causal nexus.In that sense, I cannot “do otherwise than myself” or “be anyone other than myself” (JLF; DPV XXIII: 190, 28; on Diderot on individuality and selfhood, see Thiel 2015, Wolfe 2015).