The sliver of maybe

Free will, chaos and self-delusions.

Cellular automata and how simple rules can lead to intricate patterns.

You ever try to choose between coffee and tea, and in the middle of reaching for one think, hang on – did I actually choose this? Or did my brain, caffeine tolerance, and some childhood memory of being scalded by PG Tips just collectively shove me toward it before I even had a say?

That’s free will for you – slippery little bastard. I was listening to Dr Rachel Barr (a neuroscientist) talk about this on Instagram and I really like her thoughts – the idea of us having just a sliver of free will – she’s who inspired me to write this, so full credit to her for planting this idea in my brain.

Okay, let’s look at what some of the free-will thinkers say. On the one hand, we’ve got all the hard determinist types – biologists like Robert Sapolsky, who thinks our genes and neurochemistry have already decided everything before we even lace up our decision-making boots. And the folk like Sam Harris who say free will is basically a comforting illusion you should abandon like you did your New Year’s resolutions.

But… I don’t know. That doesn’t sit right with me. Because while it’s clear most of what we do is automated nonsense stitched together by habit and hormones, there’s still something else there. Right? A sliver, like Rachel says. Not a full-blown ‘captain of your fate’ kind of free will, but a low-level steering mechanism that compounds over time – like interest on a savings account you forgot you had.

And yeah, it’s probably only a few percent of your daily choices. But over a decade? A lifetime? That shit adds up. And maybe that’s where real individuality comes from. Not from the ability to do anything, but from the ability to occasionally do something off-script.

Degrees of not-you

If you’ve ever tried to read Sapolsky’s Determined, you’ll know it’s not light bedtime reading unless your idea of a lullaby involves a 900-page love letter to biological determinism. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t get through it, but I’ve read the CliffNotes. His take is you didn’t choose anything. Not your favourite band, not your career, not even to read this – your neurons did. And they did it based on stuff you never chose either. Childhood trauma, testosterone levels, maternal affection, random mutation. You’re just the meat sack along for the ride.

Sam Harris takes the same idea and just keeps running with it. He says if you pay close attention to the moment you make a decision, you’ll notice the decision just sort of happens. You didn’t choose the thought that led to the choice. It just popped up, unbidden, like an unwanted erection in a Year 9 French class.

And if that’s the case, then free will’s done before it even started. Nothing’s really ‘up to you’. But not everyone buys that.

Daniel Dennett – the banner-bearer of compatibilism – says fine, yes, we are built from deterministic parts. But you can still call a choice ‘free’ if it flows from your reasoning, your values, your personality. In other words, freedom isn’t about being uncaused. It’s about being caused in the right kind of way. If a decision comes from you (your brain, your memories, your internal narrative), and not from a gun to the head, then maybe that’s enough.

Then there’s Peter Strawson, who didn’t give a toss about metaphysics and just said: look, we’re social animals. We hold people responsible because it works. It keeps society functioning. Whether or not free will exists at the particle level, our emotional lives – things like resentment, gratitude, forgiveness – require us to treat each other like agents who can choose. And that’s interesting because it implies that free will might be more of a social construct, like money or marriage. Not real in the physics sense, but very real in the “you cheated on me and now I’m smashing your PS5” sense.

And yet, despite all this academic beard-stroking, I keep coming back to that sliver. That compounding micro-choice in a sea of zero real options. You don’t choose your impulses, but maybe you choose which ones to feed. Maybe you choose how you tweak your own behaviour. Maybe sometimes you choose to pause and push against the default.

So who gets the blame then?

If Sapolsky’s right and we’re just elaborate biological wind-up toys, then all our legal systems and moral frameworks are basically for show. Punishment? Outdated. Praise? Misguided. “You did a bad thing” becomes “Your nervous system performed a suboptimal reaction under specific hormonal conditions.”

Which, sure, might be technically accurate. But also… gotta be bollocks, right?

Because we live in a society, not a Petri dish. And in society, how we respond to people’s actions matters. Enter Peter Strawson again, wagging his finger and saying, “Okay, but we still have to live with each other.” His point was that moral responsibility isn’t about metaphysical purity, it’s about maintaining human relationships. You can’t run a family, a workplace or a pub quiz team if everyone’s just shrugging and saying, “It wasn’t me, it was my amygdala.”

That’s why we have words like intent, premeditation, remorse. They're signals. They tell others whether you're the kind of person who might repeat that behaviour. This is also why that little sliver of will matters so much. It might be small, but it’s where growth happens. It’s the bit that lets you say, “Yeah, I screwed up – but I’ll do better.” And it’s what lets people believe you.

Take away even that – say there’s no room for change, no agency, just patterns playing out – and the whole idea of becoming a better person goes up in smoke. Which, frankly, is a depressing hill to die on.

Why bother then?

If everything’s determined, why try? Why write better stories, train harder, be kinder, stop drinking, say sorry?

Because even if most of what we are is scaffolding laid by genetics and environment, the small conscious tweaks – the rewrites and reroutes – feel real. They’re the difference between someone who’s stuck in a loop and someone who’s changing the pattern, however slowly.

This is what most compatibilists mean when they say “freedom.” Not absolute choice. Just enough choice to matter.

Dennett puts it like this: free will isn’t magic. It’s like a complex machine built out of dumb parts that, when assembled just right, can steer itself. Evolution gave us brains that can run simulations, weigh outcomes, even say no. That’s not nothing.

And maybe this is what makes us human – not that we’re fully free, but that we’re just free enough to get better.

The sliver that builds the self

Here’s where I like to land: almost all of what we do is automatic. Reaction, habit, impulse, inertia. We're all mostly meat sacks following scripts we didn’t write, on a stage we didn’t choose, in a play we only vaguely understand.

But every now and then – not often, but enough – we get a moment. A space between stimulus and response where something wiggles loose. And in that space, a choice can happen. Not a huge one, not the kind that makes history books. But a nudge. A deviation. You skip the drink. You apologise. You get up when you usually don’t. You shut up when you usually shout.

And that tiny deviation – that sliver – is your free will. It might only be 0.0000001% of you that’s nudging the steering, but it’s the only 0.0000001% that can. And with enough time each nudge becomes a habit, and habits become identity. It compounds. Those deviations from the plan add up and shape you as an individual.

You don’t become a new person overnight. You become someone else through the aggregate of tiny, often invisible acts of resistance. Little moments where you, for lack of a better word, decide. But if even a fraction of your behaviour can be nudged, cultivated, redirected – then you’ve got a reason to do the work. To become someone worth being.

It also matters for how we treat other people. If you believe no one has any control, you start excusing everything. But if you believe in too much control – in full-on rugged individualism and bootstraps for all – you start punishing people for things they never had a chance to avoid. The sliver, again, gives you a middle ground: people are shaped by forces they didn’t choose, but they can choose how to respond. Slowly. With effort. Sometimes failing. But not hopeless.

And then there’s creativity. If we’re just regurgitating inputs, remixing memes and rehashing instincts, what does it mean to create? But if there's even the smallest space for reinterpretation – for seeing the same inputs and choosing a different output – that’s art. That’s invention. That’s the fragile root of culture.

A quantum-sized loophole?

Now, let’s get a bit nerdy and take a little detour because while writing this, I watched a video from Sabine Hossenfelder and I thought it was really cool, if a little hard to follow.

Determinism means that with the right information about starting rules and conditions, outcomes are predictable. If you knew the exact state of every particle in the universe, and you had a brain the size of Laplace’s wet dream, you could predict everything. Not just ball trajectories and solar flares, but what you’re having for lunch next Thursday and whether you ghost your mates on WhatsApp again because who wants to go out at 9pm?! That’s hard determinism at the particle level. It's not fate in a mystical sense – no divine blueprint – but the idea that if you give a system its rules and starting conditions, the outcome is baked in. Like dominos. Or a brutal game of cellular automata.

Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Gerard ’t Hooft proposed that quantum mechanics – that famously fuzzy, spooky, indeterminate mess, and which Gerard said was “obviously nonsense” (his words, not mine!) – might actually be underpinned by something clean and predictable. According to his Cellular Automaton Interpretation, what looks like randomness at the quantum level could just be the result of underlying deterministic processes we’re not equipped to see. Basically, beneath all the quantum froth, he thinks the universe is made of tiny, deterministic building blocks. Think of a giant, invisible cellular automaton: a lattice of cells, each in a defined state, ticking forward according to strict rules. No spooky action. No probabilistic ghosts. Just raw, crunchy determinism.

In this view, what looks like a wave function is just our statistical best guess about what the automaton is doing. It’s like watching a football game through a straw – you can predict general motion, but not the exact positions of every player unless you had a god’s-eye view. And since we never get that view, we get uncertainty, randomness, and wave functions.

Gerard says only certain quantum states are “real” – these are called ontological states. The wave function is just a way of managing our ignorance about which ontological state we’re in. Once you know that state, the rest unfolds predictably. In principle, at least, you could trace every outcome back to that initial cellular flicker – including the way your brain decided to have tea instead of coffee.

So, where does that leave free will?

If the entire universe is one vast deterministic cellular automaton, then free will’s kaput. Every thought, action, regret, and drunken text is baked into the system from the start, right back to the Big Bang. There’s no branching. No, “you could have chosen differently.” Just a long sequence of inevitable states.

If he’s right, then even quantum indeterminacy – the thing many people point to as the last refuge of free will – might be an illusion. Everything could be preloaded. But maybe not entirely. These automata are local, bounded, and sensitive to initial conditions. If the system is complex enough, and we can’t access its full configuration, then maybe those unpredictable-seeming outcomes give rise to the illusion of choice. Chaos. Emergence. Complexity. That sliver of wiggle room.

And maybe complexity is free will’s saviour – because the complexity of a human is staggering. Think about the human brain: tens of billions of neurons, each firing in patterns shaped by genes, experiences, gut flora, how well you slept, what your mum said to you at breakfast in 1993. Predicting its behaviour requires a model so deep and detailed it collapses under its own ambition. Chaos theory tells us that in systems like this, even tiny uncertainties in starting conditions can lead to wildly different outcomes. The rules are there, but they’re buried under layers of noise, feedback, and butterfly effects.

And maybe that’s the crack the sliver slips through.

If free will exists, maybe it’s not about overriding the script. Maybe it’s about exploiting moments when the script is too complex to follow. When even the deterministic universe can’t quite see around the corner. Those tiny unpredictable shimmers – call them chaos, call them agency – might be where the feeling of freedom grows legs.

The sliver doesn’t rewrite the rules. But maybe it remixes them. And when enough of those deviations stack up, you start to look like a person. Maybe even like someone who chose to be that person.

Functional delusion

The cruel irony of the sliver is that enough accumulated ‘choice’ tricks us into thinking it’s what we always do. When we accumulate enough moments of agency and form distinct individuals, a distinct self – varied in so many ways – it’s easy to believe we made all of the choices that carried us to that state.

And maybe that’s all free will is: a useful fiction. Just because we cannot understand the complexity of even describing a starting state, doesn’t mean that’s not a reality. Free will may well just be a trick we evolved because it works – socially, morally, creatively. A functional delusion that lets us believe we’re the ones driving, even if most of the time we’re just nudging the wheel a bit left or right.

It may well be a delusion, and the sliver may be wishful thinking, but a beneficial and functional delusion.

It’s not romantic. It’s not liberating. But it is enough to be interesting. And maybe enough to be responsible. So no, I don’t think you’re free as you think. But you’re not completely screwed either. (Probably.)

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This was a really bloody deep rabbit hole to go down – my wife sat up for ages just talking about this and going back on forth on free will vs determinism. I can see how philosophers and scientists have been getting their knickers in a twist about it for millennia! Bottom line, I don’t think we can know whether or not we have free will. Even if there’s no sliver, no ability to affect an outcome, and it is all determined/predictable, I think we have to listen to Peter Strawson. Instead of getting lost in whether determinism is true or not, we should look at how our moral practices actually function. Moral responsibility doesn’t require free will – even if we’re meat puppets with delusions of agency, we’re still accountable to each other. Eitherway, it’s a very damn interesting line of thought and an excellent rabbit hole to fall down.

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