It appears that late 2023 is a particularly active time in debates about consciousness and free will. Recently, eminent proponents of free will and determinism like Erik Hoel and Robert Sapolsky, respectively, have made their cases in recent books, The World Behind the World and Determined. And a collection of consciousness researchers have publicly inveighed against a theory of consciousness, integrated information theory, that has been invoked to make arguments for free will. This free-will-discourse tinderbox seems to have been lit by recent developments in AI along with the increasingly hegemonic presence of scientific and technological innovation in our daily lives. Our technological age seems almost naturally to suggest that we ourselves are machines of flesh and blood.But Kevin J. Mitchell would like a world. His latest book, Free Agents, is "a naturalistic framework for thinking about agency and free will." In concise and clear fashion, Mitchell walks readers through millennia of evolution, the physiology of the brain, and myriad philosophical ideas about agency in order to illustrate just how said agency emerged in complex organisms. His model is persuasive, although unfortunately incomplete. Of course, there would be no fruitful debate to be had if significant ambiguity wasn't extant.Mitchell argues that organisms "cannot be understood as static machines or instantaneous arrangements of matter: instead, they are patterns of interlocking dynamical processes that actively persist through time." The pressures to persist and reproduce (natural selection) drove unfeeling and undirected processes that increased the complexity of life over time. With this complexity came the coding of stimuli into good and bad boxes (valence), the integration of many environmental stimuli in a control system (a central nervous system), the specialization of cells and cell states, the representation of the environment within organisms, simulation of possible events in a mapped environment, and eventually an abstract and recursive map of mental experience itself. Mitchell argues this final step of reasoning about reasons along with the indefiniteness of the basic rules of matter allow agency to facilitate through physical mechanisms. We act for reasons, and these reasons emerge from the collection of our experiences, the goals we've set (via metacognition), our innate proclivities, and the set of choices available to us in any situation.There's ostensibly a great deal of scientific and philosophical merit to Mitchell's thesis. It is truly a scientific defense of free will, which was something particularly difficult to pull off (with a scientific audience) a decade ago. The erudition and clarity with which Mitchell handles complex concepts is praise worthy. However, there is also a nagging measure of incompleteness to the work, including the partial vulnerability of Mitchell's argument to future discovery.What if there are fields of science that can reliably predict complex behavioral and social outcomes in humans? What if general intelligence and consciousness is achieved artificially and those entities are clearly without agency? What if the mechanisms of consciousness and metacognition are entirely illuminated and shown to be entirely outside of conscious control? Now, I think definitive answers to the questions above are unlikely, but they can't entirely be ruled out either. However, it is also possible many of Mitchell's claims would survive such developments (I think to some extent his case anticipates these issues just doesn't quite respond completely). Nonetheless, Free Agent is a provocative and special contribution to the discourse on free will. And it is certainly also a balm of sorts to the human condition to be reminded of the power and importance of will.