It’s a lazy morning, and you decide – or think you decide – to make toast. You burn the toast.
You curse. You move on.
That felt like free will. But was it?
Math says otherwise.
Imagine a lone atom floating in space. No distractions, no interference. Just a single atom in a vacuum. If we know two things, its position and its velocity, Newton’s equations can tell us exactly where it will be in the next second. And the second after that. And forever. This isn’t a guess. It’s a guarantee.
In fact, in the 18th century, a mathematician named Pierre-Simon Laplace imagined a being, later called ‘Laplace’s Demon’, that knew the position and momentum of every particle in the universe. With perfect knowledge and infinite computing power, this demon could predict the entire past and future. Every falling apple. Every burning star. Every burned piece of toast.
It’s not magic. It’s math.
Laplace believed the universe was deterministic, that the future unfolds inevitably from the present, like a row of dominoes that started falling 13.8 billion years ago and hasn’t stopped since.
But then came chaos.
Not chaos like screaming toddlers in a restaurant. Chaos Theory. It showed that even if the universe is deterministic, predicting it might be impossible. In chaotic systems – like the weather, population dynamics, traffic – even minute changes in initial conditions lead to vastly different outcomes. The famous butterfly flaps its wings, and somewhere a hurricane is born!
Mathematically, it’s still deterministic. But practically? We are toast.
Still, the math is haunting. Newton’s laws. Maxwell’s equations. Schrödinger’s wave function. They all point to a world where outcomes flow logically from inputs, where the present encodes the future. Where you don’t make decisions so much as play out the result of particles and probabilities.
So… where does that leave you?
Are you just atoms following equations? A sophisticated meat puppet playing out some cosmic algorithm?
Maybe.
But here’s where things get weird. Physics split in two. Classical physics (the Newtonian kind) gave us predictability. Quantum physics gave us dice.
According to quantum mechanics, particles don’t have definite positions or velocities until they are observed. Instead, they exist as probability clouds. The best we can do is guess where they will be. When we measure them, the cloud collapses into a single outcome, not because the particle made a choice, but because reality flipped a quantum coin.
This randomness, this indeterminacy, seems like a loophole for free will. If the universe isn’t fully predictable, maybe we are not prisoners of fate after all.
But randomness is not the same as freedom. If your choices are just coin flips, that’s not free will. That’s chaos in disguise.
The real problem is this: neither determinism nor randomness gives you control. One says everything is pre-written. The other says it’s random noise. Neither says you get to choose your story.
So maybe we need to rethink what choice means.
When the brain makes a decision, it’s not waiting for a command from some little ghost inside the skull. It’s a cascade of neurons, electric charges, chemical gradients, feedback loops, and yes, particles obeying physics. But those systems are complex. They loop. They learn. They model possibilities. They simulate futures before acting.
The brain is a prediction machine. A self-updating, bioelectrical algorithm trained on a lifetime of input.
That’s not freedom in the romantic sense. But it’s not mechanical puppetry either. It’s something new: an emergent agency. So you are not the puppeteer. You are the puppet that puppets itself.
In a sense, the universe is still deterministic. The equations still work. But between the micro-rigidity of physics and the macro-mess of life lies something precious… complexity. And complexity breeds behaviour that isn’t easily reducible. Not random. Not planned. Just self-shaped.
So no, you might not be choosing from an infinite menu. But you are choosing from the options your brain evolved to consider. And within those options, trained by memory, wired by evolution, sculpted by experience, you are making a choice.
And then you burn the toast.
And that’s okay.
