Reality and Determinism: On Free Will and Whether the Universe Was Discovered or Made

Two questions that turn out to be one question wearing different clothes

Start with the domino. Push the first one and the rest fall in an order you could, in principle, predict if you knew the exact position, weight, and spacing of every tile. This is the picture that determinism offers us for the universe itself. Pierre Simon Laplace put it plainly two centuries ago: an intelligence that knew the precise state of every particle in existence, along with the laws governing them, could calculate the entire future and the entire past in a single equation. Nothing left over. No gaps for a will to squeeze through and make a difference that was not already coming.

If Laplace is right, then what we call a decision is really just a very complicated domino chain happening inside a skull. The neurons that fire when you choose tea over coffee were always going to fire that way, given the state of the universe a moment before, which was itself fixed by the moment before that all the way back past your birth, past the formation of the solar system, to whatever conditions obtained the Creation. Your sense of choosing is real as an experience. But as an explanation for what actually happened, it may be closer to a story the brain tells itself after the fact, rather than a cause with any independent power.

Is this what decisions look like inside our skull?

The Case for Compatibilism

Most philosophers who take determinism seriously do not conclude that free will is an illusion. They argue instead that we have been asking the wrong question. This is the compatibilist position, and it goes back at least to Hume.

The relevant freedom, on this view, was never freedom from causation. It was freedom from external coercion, freedom to act according to your own desires and reasons rather than someone else's. A person who chooses to donate to charity because it reflects their values is free in every sense that matters morally, even if that choice was itself the product of a causal chain stretching back through their upbringing, temperament, and circumstance. The alternative, an action uncaused by anything at all, would not feel like freedom. It would feel like randomness, and randomness is not a will either.

I find this move persuasive, but incomplete. It rescues moral responsibility from the wreckage of hard determinism, which matters enormously for how we treat each other. But it quietly changes the subject. The person asking whether free will exists usually wants to know whether they, as a subject, could have done otherwise in some deep metaphysical sense. Compatibilism answers a different, more practical question. Both questions are worth asking. They are just not the same question, and a great deal of confusion in this debate comes from treating them as interchangeable.

Quantum Indeterminacy Will Not Save Your Free Will

Some people reach for quantum mechanics here, on the theory that if the universe is not fully deterministic at the smallest scale, then the door is open for genuine freedom. I think this hope misfires. Quantum indeterminacy introduces randomness into physical processes, not agency. A radioactive atom that decays at an unpredictable moment is not choosing to decay. If your decisions trace back to quantum noise in your neurons rather than to a fixed causal chain, you have swapped one kind of unwilled outcome for another. Neither a rigid chain of dominoes nor a roll of dice gives you authorship over your own actions.

What we actually want, when we want free will, is something closer to a third category, a self that genuinely originates its choices rather than merely inheriting or randomly generating them. Whether such a thing is coherent, let alone real, remains the hardest open question in the whole debate.

The Second Question: Was the Universe Discovered or Invented

This brings me to the stranger question, the one that sits underneath the first like a foundation nobody inspects. When we describe the causal laws that supposedly govern every domino in the chain, we describe them in the language of mathematics. And mathematics presents its own version of the same puzzle. Did humanity invent mathematics, the way we invented chess or musical notation, useful systems built to serve our purposes? Or did we discover it, the way Columbus discovered a continent that was sitting there whether or not any European ever sailed toward it?

The case for discovery is stronger than it first appears. Eugene Wigner wrote a famous essay on what he called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, pointing out how often a piece of pure mathematics, developed with no application in mind, later turns out to describe some real physical process with startling precision. Non Euclidean geometry existed as an abstract curiosity for decades before Einstein needed exactly that structure to describe curved spacetime. If mathematics were simply a human invention, a convenient fiction like a legal code, this kind of fit would be an extraordinary coincidence.

Mathematical realists, working in a tradition that goes back to Plato, take the more economical explanation seriously: numbers, sets, and structures exist independently of any mind, in something like Plato's realm of forms, and mathematicians are explorers reporting back on a territory rather than architects drafting a blueprint.

The case for invention has its own force. Mathematics is done by human brains using human concepts, built up from counting on fingers and measuring fields, and its history is full of false starts, competing axioms, and choices that could have gone otherwise. Different cultures developed different numeral systems and different geometric intuitions.

Kant offered a middle path here that I keep returning to: perhaps mathematics is neither purely invented nor purely discovered but is instead the structure of the mind itself, the very grammar through which any experience of an external world becomes possible in the first place. On this view we do not find mathematics out there in nature so much as we cannot help finding it because it is the lens we are looking through, built into the apparatus of human cognition before a single observation is made.

Why These Two Questions Are Really One

Here is where the domino chain and the mathematical realm turn out to be the same terrain viewed from two directions. If the universe runs on laws that exist independently of us, laws we merely discover rather than compose, then determinism has real teeth. The causal chain is not a human way of organising experience. It is simply how things are, and our sense of choosing is a local, subjective flicker inside a much larger and indifferent structure.

But if mathematics and the laws we express through it are in some sense products of the mind, tools we built to make an otherwise formless reality intelligible to creatures like us, then determinism itself becomes less a fact about the world and more a fact about the kind of explanations human minds find satisfying. The domino chain may be a story we tell because we are the sort of animal that needs stories with beginnings and endings, not because reality actually proceeds tile by tile.

I do not think philosophy alone settles which of these is true, and I say that as someone whose working life is built on philosophical argument. What I will say, drawing on four decades spent in a very different mode of inquiry, is that the boundary between discovered and invented starts to look less absolute the longer you sit with it. A journey, a dream, a piece of music, a proof: each can feel simultaneously found and made, encountered from outside and shaped from within, at the very same moment. Perhaps the sharp line we draw between discovery and invention says more about the limits of our categories than about the nature of what is actually there. The universe may not care which box we put it in.

What I am more confident of is this. Whether or not some deep metaphysical freedom exists at the root of a decision, the experience of deliberating, weighing, and choosing is not nothing. It is the process by which whatever we are, caused or uncaused, discovered or invented, meets the world and leaves a mark on it. That much, at least, does not depend on how the larger argument gets resolved.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, Cambridge researcher, and seventh-level shaman. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.