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Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
An evolutionary case for the existence of free will
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.
Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell’s argument has important implications—for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.
An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.
Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell’s argument has important implications—for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.
An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose, and why it matters.
342 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 3, 2023
120 people are currently reading
1444 people want to read
About the author
Kevin J. Mitchell
6 books59 followersKevin J. Mitchell is associate professor at the Smurfit Institute of Genetics and the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin and received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
November 6, 2023
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 word. 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.
Extended review on Substack
But Kevin J. Mitchell would like a word. 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.
Extended review on Substack
May 22, 2024
My review can be found here: http://www.mathemafrica.org/?p=17167
There is much to like about this book. Kevin’s discussions on evolution and neuroscience are detailed, clear, and insightful. His writing in general flows nicely and much of the book is definitely a useful text. However, for me, this does not include the sections which actually talk about free will.
The problems start early on in the book, on page 21 where he says:
"Meaning became the driving force behind the choice of action by the organism. That choice is real: the fundamental indeterminacy in the universe means the future is not written. The low-level forces of physics by themselves do not determine the next state of a complex system. In most instances, even the details of the patterns of neural activity do not actually matter and are filtered out in transmission. What matters is what they mean – how they are interpreted by the criteria established in the physical configuration of the system. Animals were now doing things for reasons.
That causal power does not come for free: it is packed into the organism through evolution, through development, and through learning. It is encoded in the genome by the actions of natural selection….
There is nothing here that violates the laws of physics; it just demands a wider concept of causation over longer timeframes and an understanding that the dynamic organisation of a system, which encodes meaning, can constrain and direct the dynamics of its component parts."
I disagree that this doesn’t violate the laws of physics. The comment here is that there is indeterminacy in the universe and that this is resolved by brains that have meaning. How?!!
Much of the book details how top-down causation from evolution and society are the things which somehow alter the dynamics, somehow in a way which isn’t at the level of the electrochemical processes.
I agree of course that evolution has shaped our brains. However, my current brain, heavily shaped by evolution, exists in its present state. Its history does not matter. It is in a state, in the world, and unless you think that there are forces beyond those that we understand, the current state of it all in phase space (ie. not just the static, but the dynamics) should be all that one needs to talk about. Either the brain does have free will in this moment, or it doesn’t, independent of how it got here.
And through discussions of quantum physics and chaotic dynamics, the equivalent of the God of the Gaps argument seems to appear. There are aspects of the world which are non-deterministic (through quantum physics) or non-predictable (through chaotic dynamics), but how the brain somehow intervenes in these gaps is glossed over and top-down causation is invoked.
He goes on later:
"…They process information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select actions.
This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behaviour of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behaviour, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing – and why it is doing it – in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense – it is informational."
We imbue meaning on top of the behaviour of organisms, of course, in a developmental, evolutionary and learning sense, but that doesn’t mean that the causal mechanisms underlying the dynamics are not simply physical ones.
In a similar vein he says:
"In a holistic sense, the organism’s neural circuits are not deciding – the organism is deciding. It’s not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It’s an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it’s not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms."
Again, I want to know how? What is the mechanism that is causing the neurons to do what they do beyond what is caused by the neurons (and other electrochemically active elements) before them in the very complex sequence? Of course these neurons are all set up with synaptic connections, neuromodulators and glial structures which have been altered through past experience. But the brain is now what it is, based on how the past of the organism, and of its lineage has been encoded in those brains. And now, in this moment the brain is as it is. What does it mean for the organism to decide, beyond the neural circuits deciding?
On this possible gap in the causal chain at the microscopic level:
"The contemporary philosopher and mathematician George Ellis similarly argues that physical indeterminacy creates causal slack in physical systems, which opens the door for what is known as “top down causation.” Put simply, this is the principle that the way a system behaves depends on the way it is configured, which can constrain the lower-level components and functionally select among patters of those components. []…This highlights another key principle, which also diverges from a reductive, comprehensively bottom-up view: causation is not wholly instantaneous."
This lack of instantaneousness in the causal chain also seems deeply mysterious and unphysical. Indeed from one moment to another some time later there may be a causal chain which links them, but the causal chain must itself be made up of well-defined causal influences that do happen at the microscopic level. Indeed they may even happen in a way which gives a big picture meaning, and there may be coherence between different parts of the causal chain. As I move my arm, all of it moves at the same time, and thus we see a moving arm. However, the movement is happening because at a microsopic level, each part of my arm is being moved in just the right way at just the right speed. Programmes have developed in my body that are now encoded, that allow this to happen. It doesn’t matter when they were encoded, they are there now and the structures in my brain send coherent signals to the muscles in my arm which allow for this movement to take place.
Regarding indeterminism, he further states::
"From this point of view, we can see that the apparent unreliability of neural transmission at the level of (at least some) individual neurons is a feature in the system, not a bug. The noisiness of neural components is a crucial factor in enabling an organism to flexibly adapt to its changing environment – both on the fly and over time. Moreover, organisms have developed numerous mechanisms to directly harness the underlying randomness in neural activity. []…These phenomena illustrate the reality of noisy processes in the nervous system and highlight a surprising but very important fact: organisms can sometimes choose to do something random."
Indeed it is well known that neural signalling is an inherently noisy process, and we can simulate populations of neurons making decisions. It is just not clear how an organism can choose to do something random beyond what the neural populations are doing. Where exactly is the cause? What is the mechanism of the top-down causation? This remains unclear.
This highlights the concept of “free-will of the gaps”:
"Martin Heisenberg [] noted in a 2009 essay that physical indeterminacy opens the door for true agency and free will. The constant jitteriness of neural activity means that the whole system is not predetermined to adopt any particular state: there are degrees of freedom in the system that the organism can exploit. The agent itself has both the power and the time to decide. Indeed, we have time to think, and choose, and change our minds, and think again if we need to."
I fear that I am becoming a broken record here: But how? How does the organism exploit these supposed degrees of freedom? Does it somehow get into the about-to-collapse wave function and nudge the collapse one way or another? If so, how? He hints at one point into the finite nature of the universe and how in chaotic systems, because you need an infinite amount of precision to truly determine anything, there is hidden indeterminacy there as well. The question remains in this case. How is the agent able to fiddle the books, down at the level, that the universe itself doesn’t otherwise have access to? If it is through “meaning” and evolutionary history, then I still need to know the mechanism. Calling it simply top-down causation just fills a gap in my understanding with a word that doesn’t itself tell me how. It all feels very much that because of the desire not to see the death of free will, the author must utilise these sleights of hand.
Anyway, I think that I have said enough on these points.
The other thing that I think absolutely needs highlighting is the fact that there are large chunks of the beginning of the book where prediction, imagination and action are discussed, without once mentioning Active Inference or Predictive Coding. He is essentially describing these topics in quite clear terms, but does not mention that there is a well-known framework for these ideas. Kevin either was unaware of the Active Inference framework or opted not to mention it explicitly. This is a confusing omission.
So, as you might be able to tell, I do not agree with the overall message of the book. The concept of free will emerging through evolution presents significant gaps. The illusion of free will is strong, but if we are going to argue that free will itself exists, there must be very clear mechanisms by which we get to fiddle at the microscopic levels of the universe in ways that apparently the universe doesn’t have access to, and that is something for which a great deal of evidence would be needed.
There is much to like about this book. Kevin’s discussions on evolution and neuroscience are detailed, clear, and insightful. His writing in general flows nicely and much of the book is definitely a useful text. However, for me, this does not include the sections which actually talk about free will.
The problems start early on in the book, on page 21 where he says:
"Meaning became the driving force behind the choice of action by the organism. That choice is real: the fundamental indeterminacy in the universe means the future is not written. The low-level forces of physics by themselves do not determine the next state of a complex system. In most instances, even the details of the patterns of neural activity do not actually matter and are filtered out in transmission. What matters is what they mean – how they are interpreted by the criteria established in the physical configuration of the system. Animals were now doing things for reasons.
That causal power does not come for free: it is packed into the organism through evolution, through development, and through learning. It is encoded in the genome by the actions of natural selection….
There is nothing here that violates the laws of physics; it just demands a wider concept of causation over longer timeframes and an understanding that the dynamic organisation of a system, which encodes meaning, can constrain and direct the dynamics of its component parts."
I disagree that this doesn’t violate the laws of physics. The comment here is that there is indeterminacy in the universe and that this is resolved by brains that have meaning. How?!!
Much of the book details how top-down causation from evolution and society are the things which somehow alter the dynamics, somehow in a way which isn’t at the level of the electrochemical processes.
I agree of course that evolution has shaped our brains. However, my current brain, heavily shaped by evolution, exists in its present state. Its history does not matter. It is in a state, in the world, and unless you think that there are forces beyond those that we understand, the current state of it all in phase space (ie. not just the static, but the dynamics) should be all that one needs to talk about. Either the brain does have free will in this moment, or it doesn’t, independent of how it got here.
And through discussions of quantum physics and chaotic dynamics, the equivalent of the God of the Gaps argument seems to appear. There are aspects of the world which are non-deterministic (through quantum physics) or non-predictable (through chaotic dynamics), but how the brain somehow intervenes in these gaps is glossed over and top-down causation is invoked.
He goes on later:
"…They process information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select actions.
This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behaviour of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behaviour, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing – and why it is doing it – in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense – it is informational."
We imbue meaning on top of the behaviour of organisms, of course, in a developmental, evolutionary and learning sense, but that doesn’t mean that the causal mechanisms underlying the dynamics are not simply physical ones.
In a similar vein he says:
"In a holistic sense, the organism’s neural circuits are not deciding – the organism is deciding. It’s not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It’s an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it’s not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms."
Again, I want to know how? What is the mechanism that is causing the neurons to do what they do beyond what is caused by the neurons (and other electrochemically active elements) before them in the very complex sequence? Of course these neurons are all set up with synaptic connections, neuromodulators and glial structures which have been altered through past experience. But the brain is now what it is, based on how the past of the organism, and of its lineage has been encoded in those brains. And now, in this moment the brain is as it is. What does it mean for the organism to decide, beyond the neural circuits deciding?
On this possible gap in the causal chain at the microscopic level:
"The contemporary philosopher and mathematician George Ellis similarly argues that physical indeterminacy creates causal slack in physical systems, which opens the door for what is known as “top down causation.” Put simply, this is the principle that the way a system behaves depends on the way it is configured, which can constrain the lower-level components and functionally select among patters of those components. []…This highlights another key principle, which also diverges from a reductive, comprehensively bottom-up view: causation is not wholly instantaneous."
This lack of instantaneousness in the causal chain also seems deeply mysterious and unphysical. Indeed from one moment to another some time later there may be a causal chain which links them, but the causal chain must itself be made up of well-defined causal influences that do happen at the microscopic level. Indeed they may even happen in a way which gives a big picture meaning, and there may be coherence between different parts of the causal chain. As I move my arm, all of it moves at the same time, and thus we see a moving arm. However, the movement is happening because at a microsopic level, each part of my arm is being moved in just the right way at just the right speed. Programmes have developed in my body that are now encoded, that allow this to happen. It doesn’t matter when they were encoded, they are there now and the structures in my brain send coherent signals to the muscles in my arm which allow for this movement to take place.
Regarding indeterminism, he further states::
"From this point of view, we can see that the apparent unreliability of neural transmission at the level of (at least some) individual neurons is a feature in the system, not a bug. The noisiness of neural components is a crucial factor in enabling an organism to flexibly adapt to its changing environment – both on the fly and over time. Moreover, organisms have developed numerous mechanisms to directly harness the underlying randomness in neural activity. []…These phenomena illustrate the reality of noisy processes in the nervous system and highlight a surprising but very important fact: organisms can sometimes choose to do something random."
Indeed it is well known that neural signalling is an inherently noisy process, and we can simulate populations of neurons making decisions. It is just not clear how an organism can choose to do something random beyond what the neural populations are doing. Where exactly is the cause? What is the mechanism of the top-down causation? This remains unclear.
This highlights the concept of “free-will of the gaps”:
"Martin Heisenberg [] noted in a 2009 essay that physical indeterminacy opens the door for true agency and free will. The constant jitteriness of neural activity means that the whole system is not predetermined to adopt any particular state: there are degrees of freedom in the system that the organism can exploit. The agent itself has both the power and the time to decide. Indeed, we have time to think, and choose, and change our minds, and think again if we need to."
I fear that I am becoming a broken record here: But how? How does the organism exploit these supposed degrees of freedom? Does it somehow get into the about-to-collapse wave function and nudge the collapse one way or another? If so, how? He hints at one point into the finite nature of the universe and how in chaotic systems, because you need an infinite amount of precision to truly determine anything, there is hidden indeterminacy there as well. The question remains in this case. How is the agent able to fiddle the books, down at the level, that the universe itself doesn’t otherwise have access to? If it is through “meaning” and evolutionary history, then I still need to know the mechanism. Calling it simply top-down causation just fills a gap in my understanding with a word that doesn’t itself tell me how. It all feels very much that because of the desire not to see the death of free will, the author must utilise these sleights of hand.
Anyway, I think that I have said enough on these points.
The other thing that I think absolutely needs highlighting is the fact that there are large chunks of the beginning of the book where prediction, imagination and action are discussed, without once mentioning Active Inference or Predictive Coding. He is essentially describing these topics in quite clear terms, but does not mention that there is a well-known framework for these ideas. Kevin either was unaware of the Active Inference framework or opted not to mention it explicitly. This is a confusing omission.
So, as you might be able to tell, I do not agree with the overall message of the book. The concept of free will emerging through evolution presents significant gaps. The illusion of free will is strong, but if we are going to argue that free will itself exists, there must be very clear mechanisms by which we get to fiddle at the microscopic levels of the universe in ways that apparently the universe doesn’t have access to, and that is something for which a great deal of evidence would be needed.
January 31, 2024
My main issue with this book is that it doesn't really deliver on the thesis. It is mostly just an intro to evolutionary biology with an invitation to reframe some causes as free will. If you do not believe in free will already, this book is very unlikely to persuade you
November 25, 2023
Whether we have free will is one of those thorny, endlessly debated philosophical questions. The author’s perspective is that not only we do have free will, but there’s an obvious evolutionary path to free will. If the world is deterministic, then of course, everything is preordained. But quantum mechanics already showed that nature is fundamentally probabilistic. And this was intuited as far back as Epicurus who claims atoms have to “swerve” in their path. To obtain certain reward in a probabilistic environment requires some algorithm (e.g., “if unsuccessful try again”). The book charted the path of how cells, sensors, neurons, and concept of self were all advantageous to the persistence of organisms and thus evolutionarily selected. Subsequently, a decision making process that can simulate the risk and reward of actions also evolved. Coupled with memory and long-term reinforcement learning, this decision making process becomes, in a nutshell, our free will.
Good story telling all around. Of course, this will probably not end the debate of whether we have free will. But I’m sold.
Good story telling all around. Of course, this will probably not end the debate of whether we have free will. But I’m sold.
April 25, 2024
Immediately after reading Robert Sapolsky’s
Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will
I was interested in hearing the “opposite” perspective on the topic, ideally, from the point of view of another neurobiologist. Enter: Kevin J. Mitchell, whose book came out the same month as Sapolsky’s and for anyone interested, he debated both Sapolsky and Susan Blackmore on the issue.
Short version: “Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Will”
Kevin Mitchell sets out to “naturalize” the concept of Free Will. He rejects Dualism and Libertarian Free Will and begins by re-defining Free Will to essentially mean the capacity of the organism “as a whole” for self-control and rational deliberation. He grounds the emergency of such agency on an evolutionary narrative, evocative of Daniel Dennett’s approach in “Freedom Evolves”. So far so good.
Well, actually, Mitchell wants a bit more than that. He wants to break from Compatibilist notions – which he considered to be incoherent – and instead, establish a type of “could have done otherwise” Free Will. To this end, he challenges Determinism by primarily invoking Quantum Mechanics and arguing that the universe is under-determined at any given time and that this provides the “causal slack” necessary for the evolution of Free Will. In the process, he conflates Causal Determinism with Predeterminism and does not provide a convincing account of how indeterminacy makes room for Free Will nor does he provide an account on how biological organisms could escape Causality, which is arguably the main question at hand, especially if “Determinism is false” and “Compatibilism is incoherent”.
For this reason, Mitchell proposes a two-stage model based on “conscious cognitive control”, “top-down” or “mental” causation and adds some “random noise” in the mix that can give rise to novel thoughts or break habitual patterns when necessary. Ultimately, I do not think that his model gives us the “could have done otherwise” Free Will that he wants. In short,: 1) he conflates “would have done otherwise” with “could have done otherwise”. 2) Top-down causation does not mean the “I”, the “conscious Self”, do the “causing”. 3) More importantly “Conscious cognitive control” is asserted without enough evidence to back it up, while opposing evidence – for instance Daniel Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” – are not seriously considered.
Kevin Mitchel gathers the pieces but does not put them together. There are missing parts so that the reader can fill a belief in Free Will. Unfortunately, these gaps rely on conflation, internal contradictions and ignoring opposing evidence. For a naturalistic defense of free will, maybe you’d be better off reading Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves” or “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting”.
For a longer version, feel free to read my semi-organised notes and thoughts below.
The evolution of agency
Keving Mitchell begins with the beginning of life on Earth. From the first simple replicators, the first living organisms, the first neurons, all the way up to human beings. Living organisms are not passive entities, pushed around by external stimuli. Even the simplests living organisms require energy to fuel their existence and battle against entropy. The world is complicated and in perpetual flux. This necessitates some means to sense their surroundings in order to respond appropriately to dynamic situations. Even simple organisms have to derive behaviors driven by their intrinsic motivations (e.g., eat, survive, propagate). If they did not, they couldn’t survive and propagate. Organisms that can not persist, do not. Thus, even the simplest organisms exhibit rudimentary decision-making capabilities and agency.
Furthermore, neural systems have the advantage of learning from experience, what are some useful strategies for surviving, mating and even living in groups. On top of that, cognition, the ability to deliberate or meta-cognition, having thoughts about thoughts, can help organisms navigate and adapt to even more complicated, natural and social, environments.
Thoughts are not “mere” neural firings, but meaningful patterns of neural activity that can have causal effect onto the organism and onto the world. Furthermore, brains evolved with the ability to even make long term plans and have the necessary self-control to carry them through. Mitchell provides a plausible evolutionary account of agency and how these mechanisms could have emerged through the process of natural selection.
Naturalizing Free Will
That is all well and good! But Mitchell doesn’t stop there. That’s not the goal of the book. Instead, he argues that we are FREE agents and that through evolution we gained the ability of Free Will. Not libertarian Free Will. Mitchell wants to “naturalize” the Self and Free Will, aka reject Dualism (there is no immaterial soul thinking the thoughts and making the decisions) and instead provide naturalistic accounts for these concepts. Instead, “I” as a whole organism, as an embodied brain, make decisions.
This argument should sound very familiar to anyone who has read Compatibilists, especially Daniel Dennet. In Freedom Evolves (2003), Dennett provides a similar account of how evolution creates little controllers. Dennett “notoriously” (for some) redefines Free Will to mean essentially the ability of self-control and rational deliberation. If an agent’s intentions align with their will and there is no external coercion or internal pathologies and if the agent has the ability to control their will and deliberate and reason over alternatives, we can speak of free will in a pragmatic sense required for moral responsibility. This type of free will comes in various degrees according to Dennett.
However, Mitchell considers this line of thinking to be incoherent. We can’t hold people responsible if they “could not have done otherwise”. Thus, he wants to dispute Determinism and maintain a sort of “could have done otherwise” free will while maintaining a naturalistic/materialist framework.
Determinism vs Indeterminism
For Mitchell there is no reason to accept that the Universe is deterministic. Quantum randomness and Chaos Theory show that the universe is under-determined at any given time. He does not make the naive claim that “quantum randomness = free will”. If quantum effects bubble up and affect my behavior, this would not be “free and willed choice”.
Instead, Mitchell contends that randomness provides some “causal slack” in the system that is necessary for Free Will. He claims that this “flips the script”. “We don’t need to ask where freedom comes from. Freedom comes for free. It’s just in the universe. But now we have to ask something else… How can an organism control what happens? Of all these possibilities, how can it make what it wants to happen?”
Mitchell’s claim about indeterminism is debatable. It depends on specific interpretations of quantum mechanics, and assumptions that these effects appear and have effects at the macro-level. But let’s grant them for the moment. Ultimately, I don't think that the “Determinism vs Indeterminism” debate has much bearing on Free Will. The real question is about Causality. If biological, human brains could escape Causality (including random causes). And I doubt that they can.
Two-stage model + Indeterminism = Free Will?
Mitchell supports a Two stage model, when faced with an important decision, various alternatives are generated, filtered through various mechanisms (stage one) and afterwards the agent can deliberate over these possibilities and choose (stage two).
During the first stage, the agent may have no direct control over the generated alternatives. Alternatives arise in combination given the current circumstances Randomness or noise in the brain can affect the generation. Some of these alternatives may be filtered out given the agent’s past (e.g., personality). During the second stage, the agent can deliberate, reason for and against each alternative, weigh their pros and cons and make a decision. For Mitchell, randomness and “noise” in the brain can help the system break from habitual neural pathways and lead to novel thoughts.
Let’s consider the Quintessential philosophical question: Coffee or Tea?. Let’s imagine that I have formed a daily habit. Each morning, I wake up and go to the nearest coffee shop to grab an espresso. However, this morning, while going to the coffee shop, I recalled an article that I read last night about some supposed negative side effects of drinking coffee. So now I have to make a decision. Should I grab an espresso or something else?
[Stage 1] Generation of alternatives: [Coffee, Black Tea, Green Tea]
Given the circumstances and my prior experience and preferences, the brain does not even consider choices such as Beer, Kombucha, Mate or Cocoa with dairy milk. It’s early in the morning so i wouldn’t choose Beer.The store doesn’t provide Kombucha or Mate. Nor do I really like them. Being Vegan for 10+ years, the brain does not even consider a dairy-based option as a candidate. So here I am. Three alternatives enter conscious experience and I deliberate over them. E.g.:
“Well I like the taste of coffee but it makes me jittery sometimes”
…
“Green tea is ok but i’d like something to wake me up a bit”
…
“Let’s have a black tea” (Stage 2).
So, I enter the coffee shop. The barista asks me “what would you like?”. I reply: “I’ll have a black tea” .
A Determinist would say that, if we rolled back the tape of life, the outcome would not change. If we could go back to the moment that I started from my home with the intention to grab a coffee while maintaining ALL factors the same, every atom in the universe is exactly as it was, then the exact thing will happen, a million times over. I will have the same candidate options, the same thoughts will arise in my brain and I will choose to buy a black team every single time.
The indeterminist would say: “Aha! But there are random quantum fluctuations bubbling up to the macro scale. There is “random noise” in the brain. The universe is “chaotic” and complex.” Does this give us Free Will? Well! Let’s say that while walking some random event causes a novel thought to arise in my brain and I end up with a different choice. A flicker of light hits my retina, I notice that a new option has been added to the menu, Chai Latte with oat milk. “Great! I want to change things up. I’ll have that!”. So in this case: I did otherwise. And I would do otherwise many times over. But what does this have to do with Free Will? In all scenarios, I did not have control over the random events that altered my behavior, nor about the thoughts that arose as a result.
I know such examples seem inconsequential but I think they are illustrative and the same logic can be applied to truly meaningful decisions. “Would do otherwise” is different from “could do otherwise” and the former is not really an indication of Free Will and ”Really Free Choices”. Unless thought processes can be shown to somehow be independent of the chain of Causality, I do not see how any such Two Stage model can give us the type of Free Will. Only if we were talking about a Compatibilist definition, which Mitchell explicitly denies.
Time + Self Control = Free Will? Or, “On Building Character”
Okay, so maybe we do not have “true” control at any given moment. But how about over time? Let’s consider habits. For Mitchell, habits are learned adaptations to our environment. They can be very useful in guiding behavior. I’ve built good habits since childhood of having a nutritious breakfast each morning and brushing my teeth. Now, I don’t have to deliberate each day on these issues and I can spend my time on other more important things. But of course, some habits are not as useful or can be destructive. Human beings, or atleast many of us, have the ability to recognise bad habits and work to overcome them and replace them with better habits. To some extent at least. Breaking habits require continuous and repeated effort. For Mitchell, we may be biological organisms who are shaped by our biology, environment and our past experience, but we also have the ability to shape and change our habits and shape our Character to some extent. By extension, our Character will shape and influence our future decisions.
Mitchell acknowledges that some people may be better than others at that and some may not have that ability at all. But if we accept the previous argument, that we can’t make “Really Free Choice” in the moment, aka our choices can not escape causality, then how can we speak about making choices over time and be responsible for building our Character?
Moreover, this type of self-control can be affected by multiple factors including being hungry, lacking sleep, hormonal levels etc, it can be depleted and manipulated and we can not “will” to have more self-control in any given moment. It is a matter of “Moral Luck”: to have had the appropriate genetic material, brain anatomy, upbringing, etc in order to develop the ability of self-control and to make “good decisions” that will contribute to building a “better” Character.
“Willing what we will”
Mitchell also criticizes the famous Arthur Schopenhauer quote: “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills”. Instead, Mitchell posits that we change our will and motivations all the time. We can deliberate, “do I want to be this sort of person?” and we can change course of action. For instance: I am hungry. I want to order a burger. But then I contend: “Do I want to be this person?”. “I should eat something more healthy” and “I should save money” -> “Let’s cook something healthy and inexpensive”. But isn’t that just another “will”? How was that “will” selected and prevailed over the others? I would contend that it just arose as all the other “wills”, based on prior causes.
Top-down Causation and Conscious Cognitive Control
So far my criticism of Mitchell’s argument may sound overly critical. My criticism relies on the idea that “Really Free Choice” does not make sense under a non-dualist and naturalistic framework. Mitchell could consider a Compatibilist account of agency, but he considers it incoherent and wants a naturalistic version of “could have done otherwise” Free WIll. That’s why I insist on the incoherence of “Really Free Choice” in Mithcell’s account. His last resort is “conscious cognitive control” and top-down causation. He says (46:00): “I am consciously deciding what I am going to say, lifting my hand up and putting it down, and I know that I am conscious of my reasons for doing these things because I can articulate them. So, we have this meta-cognition which allows us to reason about our reasons …”
So Mitchell sets out to naturalize the Self and Free Will. To conceptualize Free Will as a characteristic that the human being, as a total organism, possesses. But he wants more. He says that Free Will is “Conscious Cognitive Control” or “Conscious Rational Control” but this is just asserted. No evidence provided. And evidence negating his position are not seriously considered. There is no serious discussion on the experiments that would show the problems with the idea of the conscious will. For instance, Daniel Wegner, in “The illusion of conscious will” draws from various experiments, from Ramachandran, Penfield, Delgado and others, to show how we produce post-hoc rationalizations to justify our behavior while maintaining the sense of ownership.
Mitchell makes a big deal of “top-down” or “mental” causation. I hear in the news about a terrible accident, the information is propagated, deciphered and interpreted by the brain and causes an emotional reaction. In this sense, the “top” (meaning) caused the “down” (emotional response). But, firstly I had no control over this process. The “conscious self” did not make the choice to have an emotional response. The emotional response was caused by the interpretation of information and its associated neural activity. Similarly, the conscious experience and the emotional response could be mere correlations and that the former is not necessary for the latter. For instance, consider how sub-liminal or implicit biases can arise that can cause emotional responses even without conscious awareness. But there is no explanation how the conscious experience produced by a mechanical brain, could have itself causal power, somehow independent of these processes.
I mean, Mitchell could be right. There may be some central Self that we’ve missed which exhibits actual conscious control of our thoughts and actions. But that should be somehow demonstrated. It can not simply be asserted and assumed true - if we want a scientific account for Free Will. However, if we deny Dualism and the materialist Cartesian Theater, I'd say that “conscious cognitive control” may be rather limited, unless we can demonstrate some type of “strong emergence” which also sounds somewhat unlikely to me.
(Continues Below)
Short version: “Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Will”
Kevin Mitchell sets out to “naturalize” the concept of Free Will. He rejects Dualism and Libertarian Free Will and begins by re-defining Free Will to essentially mean the capacity of the organism “as a whole” for self-control and rational deliberation. He grounds the emergency of such agency on an evolutionary narrative, evocative of Daniel Dennett’s approach in “Freedom Evolves”. So far so good.
Well, actually, Mitchell wants a bit more than that. He wants to break from Compatibilist notions – which he considered to be incoherent – and instead, establish a type of “could have done otherwise” Free Will. To this end, he challenges Determinism by primarily invoking Quantum Mechanics and arguing that the universe is under-determined at any given time and that this provides the “causal slack” necessary for the evolution of Free Will. In the process, he conflates Causal Determinism with Predeterminism and does not provide a convincing account of how indeterminacy makes room for Free Will nor does he provide an account on how biological organisms could escape Causality, which is arguably the main question at hand, especially if “Determinism is false” and “Compatibilism is incoherent”.
For this reason, Mitchell proposes a two-stage model based on “conscious cognitive control”, “top-down” or “mental” causation and adds some “random noise” in the mix that can give rise to novel thoughts or break habitual patterns when necessary. Ultimately, I do not think that his model gives us the “could have done otherwise” Free Will that he wants. In short,: 1) he conflates “would have done otherwise” with “could have done otherwise”. 2) Top-down causation does not mean the “I”, the “conscious Self”, do the “causing”. 3) More importantly “Conscious cognitive control” is asserted without enough evidence to back it up, while opposing evidence – for instance Daniel Wegner’s “The Illusion of Conscious Will” – are not seriously considered.
Kevin Mitchel gathers the pieces but does not put them together. There are missing parts so that the reader can fill a belief in Free Will. Unfortunately, these gaps rely on conflation, internal contradictions and ignoring opposing evidence. For a naturalistic defense of free will, maybe you’d be better off reading Dennett’s “Freedom Evolves” or “Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting”.
For a longer version, feel free to read my semi-organised notes and thoughts below.
The evolution of agency
Keving Mitchell begins with the beginning of life on Earth. From the first simple replicators, the first living organisms, the first neurons, all the way up to human beings. Living organisms are not passive entities, pushed around by external stimuli. Even the simplests living organisms require energy to fuel their existence and battle against entropy. The world is complicated and in perpetual flux. This necessitates some means to sense their surroundings in order to respond appropriately to dynamic situations. Even simple organisms have to derive behaviors driven by their intrinsic motivations (e.g., eat, survive, propagate). If they did not, they couldn’t survive and propagate. Organisms that can not persist, do not. Thus, even the simplest organisms exhibit rudimentary decision-making capabilities and agency.
Furthermore, neural systems have the advantage of learning from experience, what are some useful strategies for surviving, mating and even living in groups. On top of that, cognition, the ability to deliberate or meta-cognition, having thoughts about thoughts, can help organisms navigate and adapt to even more complicated, natural and social, environments.
Thoughts are not “mere” neural firings, but meaningful patterns of neural activity that can have causal effect onto the organism and onto the world. Furthermore, brains evolved with the ability to even make long term plans and have the necessary self-control to carry them through. Mitchell provides a plausible evolutionary account of agency and how these mechanisms could have emerged through the process of natural selection.
Naturalizing Free Will
That is all well and good! But Mitchell doesn’t stop there. That’s not the goal of the book. Instead, he argues that we are FREE agents and that through evolution we gained the ability of Free Will. Not libertarian Free Will. Mitchell wants to “naturalize” the Self and Free Will, aka reject Dualism (there is no immaterial soul thinking the thoughts and making the decisions) and instead provide naturalistic accounts for these concepts. Instead, “I” as a whole organism, as an embodied brain, make decisions.
This argument should sound very familiar to anyone who has read Compatibilists, especially Daniel Dennet. In Freedom Evolves (2003), Dennett provides a similar account of how evolution creates little controllers. Dennett “notoriously” (for some) redefines Free Will to mean essentially the ability of self-control and rational deliberation. If an agent’s intentions align with their will and there is no external coercion or internal pathologies and if the agent has the ability to control their will and deliberate and reason over alternatives, we can speak of free will in a pragmatic sense required for moral responsibility. This type of free will comes in various degrees according to Dennett.
However, Mitchell considers this line of thinking to be incoherent. We can’t hold people responsible if they “could not have done otherwise”. Thus, he wants to dispute Determinism and maintain a sort of “could have done otherwise” free will while maintaining a naturalistic/materialist framework.
Determinism vs Indeterminism
For Mitchell there is no reason to accept that the Universe is deterministic. Quantum randomness and Chaos Theory show that the universe is under-determined at any given time. He does not make the naive claim that “quantum randomness = free will”. If quantum effects bubble up and affect my behavior, this would not be “free and willed choice”.
Instead, Mitchell contends that randomness provides some “causal slack” in the system that is necessary for Free Will. He claims that this “flips the script”. “We don’t need to ask where freedom comes from. Freedom comes for free. It’s just in the universe. But now we have to ask something else… How can an organism control what happens? Of all these possibilities, how can it make what it wants to happen?”
Mitchell’s claim about indeterminism is debatable. It depends on specific interpretations of quantum mechanics, and assumptions that these effects appear and have effects at the macro-level. But let’s grant them for the moment. Ultimately, I don't think that the “Determinism vs Indeterminism” debate has much bearing on Free Will. The real question is about Causality. If biological, human brains could escape Causality (including random causes). And I doubt that they can.
Two-stage model + Indeterminism = Free Will?
Mitchell supports a Two stage model, when faced with an important decision, various alternatives are generated, filtered through various mechanisms (stage one) and afterwards the agent can deliberate over these possibilities and choose (stage two).
During the first stage, the agent may have no direct control over the generated alternatives. Alternatives arise in combination given the current circumstances Randomness or noise in the brain can affect the generation. Some of these alternatives may be filtered out given the agent’s past (e.g., personality). During the second stage, the agent can deliberate, reason for and against each alternative, weigh their pros and cons and make a decision. For Mitchell, randomness and “noise” in the brain can help the system break from habitual neural pathways and lead to novel thoughts.
Let’s consider the Quintessential philosophical question: Coffee or Tea?. Let’s imagine that I have formed a daily habit. Each morning, I wake up and go to the nearest coffee shop to grab an espresso. However, this morning, while going to the coffee shop, I recalled an article that I read last night about some supposed negative side effects of drinking coffee. So now I have to make a decision. Should I grab an espresso or something else?
[Stage 1] Generation of alternatives: [Coffee, Black Tea, Green Tea]
Given the circumstances and my prior experience and preferences, the brain does not even consider choices such as Beer, Kombucha, Mate or Cocoa with dairy milk. It’s early in the morning so i wouldn’t choose Beer.The store doesn’t provide Kombucha or Mate. Nor do I really like them. Being Vegan for 10+ years, the brain does not even consider a dairy-based option as a candidate. So here I am. Three alternatives enter conscious experience and I deliberate over them. E.g.:
“Well I like the taste of coffee but it makes me jittery sometimes”
…
“Green tea is ok but i’d like something to wake me up a bit”
…
“Let’s have a black tea” (Stage 2).
So, I enter the coffee shop. The barista asks me “what would you like?”. I reply: “I’ll have a black tea” .
A Determinist would say that, if we rolled back the tape of life, the outcome would not change. If we could go back to the moment that I started from my home with the intention to grab a coffee while maintaining ALL factors the same, every atom in the universe is exactly as it was, then the exact thing will happen, a million times over. I will have the same candidate options, the same thoughts will arise in my brain and I will choose to buy a black team every single time.
The indeterminist would say: “Aha! But there are random quantum fluctuations bubbling up to the macro scale. There is “random noise” in the brain. The universe is “chaotic” and complex.” Does this give us Free Will? Well! Let’s say that while walking some random event causes a novel thought to arise in my brain and I end up with a different choice. A flicker of light hits my retina, I notice that a new option has been added to the menu, Chai Latte with oat milk. “Great! I want to change things up. I’ll have that!”. So in this case: I did otherwise. And I would do otherwise many times over. But what does this have to do with Free Will? In all scenarios, I did not have control over the random events that altered my behavior, nor about the thoughts that arose as a result.
I know such examples seem inconsequential but I think they are illustrative and the same logic can be applied to truly meaningful decisions. “Would do otherwise” is different from “could do otherwise” and the former is not really an indication of Free Will and ”Really Free Choices”. Unless thought processes can be shown to somehow be independent of the chain of Causality, I do not see how any such Two Stage model can give us the type of Free Will. Only if we were talking about a Compatibilist definition, which Mitchell explicitly denies.
Time + Self Control = Free Will? Or, “On Building Character”
Okay, so maybe we do not have “true” control at any given moment. But how about over time? Let’s consider habits. For Mitchell, habits are learned adaptations to our environment. They can be very useful in guiding behavior. I’ve built good habits since childhood of having a nutritious breakfast each morning and brushing my teeth. Now, I don’t have to deliberate each day on these issues and I can spend my time on other more important things. But of course, some habits are not as useful or can be destructive. Human beings, or atleast many of us, have the ability to recognise bad habits and work to overcome them and replace them with better habits. To some extent at least. Breaking habits require continuous and repeated effort. For Mitchell, we may be biological organisms who are shaped by our biology, environment and our past experience, but we also have the ability to shape and change our habits and shape our Character to some extent. By extension, our Character will shape and influence our future decisions.
Mitchell acknowledges that some people may be better than others at that and some may not have that ability at all. But if we accept the previous argument, that we can’t make “Really Free Choice” in the moment, aka our choices can not escape causality, then how can we speak about making choices over time and be responsible for building our Character?
Moreover, this type of self-control can be affected by multiple factors including being hungry, lacking sleep, hormonal levels etc, it can be depleted and manipulated and we can not “will” to have more self-control in any given moment. It is a matter of “Moral Luck”: to have had the appropriate genetic material, brain anatomy, upbringing, etc in order to develop the ability of self-control and to make “good decisions” that will contribute to building a “better” Character.
“Willing what we will”
Mitchell also criticizes the famous Arthur Schopenhauer quote: “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills”. Instead, Mitchell posits that we change our will and motivations all the time. We can deliberate, “do I want to be this sort of person?” and we can change course of action. For instance: I am hungry. I want to order a burger. But then I contend: “Do I want to be this person?”. “I should eat something more healthy” and “I should save money” -> “Let’s cook something healthy and inexpensive”. But isn’t that just another “will”? How was that “will” selected and prevailed over the others? I would contend that it just arose as all the other “wills”, based on prior causes.
Top-down Causation and Conscious Cognitive Control
So far my criticism of Mitchell’s argument may sound overly critical. My criticism relies on the idea that “Really Free Choice” does not make sense under a non-dualist and naturalistic framework. Mitchell could consider a Compatibilist account of agency, but he considers it incoherent and wants a naturalistic version of “could have done otherwise” Free WIll. That’s why I insist on the incoherence of “Really Free Choice” in Mithcell’s account. His last resort is “conscious cognitive control” and top-down causation. He says (46:00): “I am consciously deciding what I am going to say, lifting my hand up and putting it down, and I know that I am conscious of my reasons for doing these things because I can articulate them. So, we have this meta-cognition which allows us to reason about our reasons …”
So Mitchell sets out to naturalize the Self and Free Will. To conceptualize Free Will as a characteristic that the human being, as a total organism, possesses. But he wants more. He says that Free Will is “Conscious Cognitive Control” or “Conscious Rational Control” but this is just asserted. No evidence provided. And evidence negating his position are not seriously considered. There is no serious discussion on the experiments that would show the problems with the idea of the conscious will. For instance, Daniel Wegner, in “The illusion of conscious will” draws from various experiments, from Ramachandran, Penfield, Delgado and others, to show how we produce post-hoc rationalizations to justify our behavior while maintaining the sense of ownership.
Mitchell makes a big deal of “top-down” or “mental” causation. I hear in the news about a terrible accident, the information is propagated, deciphered and interpreted by the brain and causes an emotional reaction. In this sense, the “top” (meaning) caused the “down” (emotional response). But, firstly I had no control over this process. The “conscious self” did not make the choice to have an emotional response. The emotional response was caused by the interpretation of information and its associated neural activity. Similarly, the conscious experience and the emotional response could be mere correlations and that the former is not necessary for the latter. For instance, consider how sub-liminal or implicit biases can arise that can cause emotional responses even without conscious awareness. But there is no explanation how the conscious experience produced by a mechanical brain, could have itself causal power, somehow independent of these processes.
I mean, Mitchell could be right. There may be some central Self that we’ve missed which exhibits actual conscious control of our thoughts and actions. But that should be somehow demonstrated. It can not simply be asserted and assumed true - if we want a scientific account for Free Will. However, if we deny Dualism and the materialist Cartesian Theater, I'd say that “conscious cognitive control” may be rather limited, unless we can demonstrate some type of “strong emergence” which also sounds somewhat unlikely to me.
(Continues Below)
September 3, 2024
I started this book with the hope of reading a good account of compatibilism from a scientist's point of view, but I was disturbed by a lot of unsubstantiated claims. The book has a good amount of biology and I learned something new; and I even partially agree with some of the author's main points. However, I have not read a book more filled with not only wrong physics, but also philosophical confusions and inconsistencies -- not even among books written by scientists trying philosophy. The author's main point is that quantum indeterminism demonstrates that fundamental physics is not fully causal, and this leaves room for macroscopic features to impose causal power; this means reductionism is wrong and human agency and free will exists; also, this free will is the same as the human biology and is not in conflict with physicalism. I think the last 3 chapters about the self, free will, self-cause, and the moral implications are mostly valid, but they're built unnecessarily on a fragile premise of quantum indeterminism, which is due to the author's problematic understanding of causation and reductionism. With causation, the author wrongly argues determinism leaves no room for causation, and quantum indeterminism is needed to talk about causation; and he conflates high-level causation -- an approximate summary of low-level causation in aggregate -- with low-level causation, which makes he claim that high-level causal power can be put together with low-level cause together as complimentarily contributing causes, implying high-level causal power is ontologically separate from low-level. With reductionism, the author conflates epistemological reductionism -- the idea that only low-level physics research is needed to understand high-level phenomena -- with ontological reductionism -- the idea that low-level physics is the only laws of nature required to generate high-level phenomena even though it's non-trivial or impossible to keep track of how; he makes valid examples and arguments against epistemological reductionism, but arrives at rejecting ontological reductionism; this is then connected back to his conclusion of high-level causal power as ontological and therefore independent of low-level causes. All of these make him arrive at a free will that is implicitly ontologically separate from the biology; but, it contradicts with his later claim that this free will is the same as our human biology. Moreover, there are many places where he uses concepts such agency, learning, reasoning, choice, etc., without clear definitions or enough discussions. With these confusions, he builds up his argument of human agency and causal power from lower-level organisms, yet everything he says about those biological organisms applies to humans as well as to many human-made machines and non-biological objects. These are all fine in terms of Daniel Dennett's intentional stance, but clearly not the author's intended meaning: he tries at length to demarcate which ones are an organic whole that can be considered an agent, but those are vague descriptions without substance that can be applied also to many inanimate entities. The whole book is terribly written, and although I can see there are some good ideas to be salvaged, they're mostly immersed in confusing statements, and other people have talked about them more cleanly.
An example early in the book on "agency" goes like this:
Suddenly we're talking about "learn," "experience," "develop their own reasons," and "choosing" here. Does creating a history of itself through actions and experiences, and then basing decision making on those imply "agency"? It seems the author is trying to distinguish "preprogrammed drone" with something that learns through actions, but that is a vague and useless distinction: humans have preprogrammed machines with algorithms that adaptively change how they interact with the world based on their history. A lot of simple control systems do that already, before we even need to get into machine learning or artificial intelligence. It's easy to interpret his statements to include human-made machines, or even natural non-biological phenomena: The hurricane is not a preprogrammed drone. It goes out into the world, interacts with houses, forests, land, cloud, hot and cold air, and through the history of its own actions and its own experiences, changes its course. As it interacts with the world along its path, its composition changes, which changes how it responds to environmental conditions such as air humidity, temperature, pressure, and flow. This is how it develops its own reasons for choosing one action over another in any given situation. The hurricane is an agent!
Again and again, the author writes about solid science in the previous paragraph, and in the next one the claim of agency occurs without justification. The conclusion that it's an agent is suddenly there, because every new mysterious concept he brings up presumes the agent.
In other places, the author tries to make some distinctions but fails to convince. For example,
The author seems to have serious misunderstandings of what "a machine computing inputs to produce outputs" means: this can describe most systems in the world, animate or inanimate (whatever the distinction is), and is not in conflict with "an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons." They can be two ways of describing the same thing, for different purposes. He does have a valid point here: epistemological reductionism is not helpful -- "we lose sight" -- but the way he presents the two opposites doesn't make sense. At the end of the book, he even mentions the importance of general systems theory, control theory, and cybernetics as moving away from (epistemological) reductionism, without realizing his contradiction and his misunderstanding of systems theory and control theory here. Same for differentiating "the organism's neural circuits" and "the organism," a confusing claim. He would be better served by saying it's not useful to view things reductively (against epistemological reductionism), but the conclusion he takes from here, that the integrated self has its own causal power outside of fundamental physics (against ontological reductionism), is questionable. Importantly, his distinction needs to be carefully analyzed by considering his definitions of causation and of reductionism, which I'll come to next.
On causation, the author rejects its possibility under determinism:
This is wrong in the agreed understanding of general relativity. Everything doesn't just happen, even in a deterministic universe. They must happen in a specific sequence based on the laws of physics. Before talking about counterfactuals, we can view physics as laws of regularity instead of laws of counterfactual causation. The difference is that laws of regularity specify how a progression of events should be logically related: an event happened before means a later event must happen in a specific way, not in any other way. Metaphorically, we can think of Euclidean geometry: if the rule says there can only be straight lines, seeing a part of a straight line means knowing how it will extend infinitely both ways. This is the geometric interpretation of general relativity, and regularity holds in this deterministic universe. Moreover, counterfactual thinking is helpful here: if this part of the straight line were to tilt to a different angle, we know how it should be extending. This knowledge can be used if later on we do see a part of another straight line tilted in that different angle. The reason we can do counterfactual thinking is that general relativity is not only a description of the world, but can also be used to prescribe an imaginary world that doesn't exist; additionally, it is not only a law that we use to map out the entirety of the universe, but can also be used to approximately describe only local events. It's true that in this particular deterministic universe, nothing could have been different, but counterfactual thinking is not only about "what could have been different in this universe" -- it can also be about "what could have been different in another imagined universe"; additionally, it can also be about "what would happen elsewhen elsewhere in this universe" based on what's observed here and now. By denying the possibility of counterfactual thinking, the author is proclaiming necessitarianism, a much stronger form of metaphysics than determinism, and this is a distinction he fails to clarify. Thus, we already have two ways of defining causality under determinism: by regularity and by counterfactuals, both valid and useful in a deterministic universe. Without this realization, it's no wonder the author has to resort to quantum indeterminism to look for causation.
Quantum indeterminism is the main basis of causation and agency the author builds on. In addition to the problem explained above, his arguments also wrongly conflates low- and high-level causality. I will skip his useless random side notes, some of them wrong, on chaos and quantum fluctuations (no distinctions made between deterministic chaos and quantum chaos, or between unpredictability and indeterminism), and present his conclusion:
There are three steps here:
Step One: Quantum physics is not deterministic, therefore it is not causally comprehensive.
Step Two: Therefore, higher-level features can also be causal.
Step Three: Therefore, we are causal.
All of them are questionable. For Step One, indeterminism doesn't mean not causally comprehensive. The whole debate in quantum theory over the last century has been whether it is a complete theory, meaning no other factors outside of this theory can be used to better predict the outcome. Currently, the physics community agrees that quantum mechanics, or more precisely the Standard Model that incapsulates several Quantum Field Theories, is complete or can comprehensively explain everything except where quantum gravity is needed, which is not relevant for studying the human brain. For Step Two, the existence of the "causal work" of "contextual constraints" is suspicious. Not only does he go from the potential ("opens the door") to the actual ("can also do") without evidence, but this "causal work" is also contradictory to quantum physics. If quantum physics were not causauly comprehensive and other causal factors exist, such causal work of higher-level features would mean they can have an impact on the statistical outcomes of the collapse of wave functions, which is not supported by experiments. For Step Three, going from some high-level system to brain, he uses the same trick as before: starting from the solid science of quantum physics, he brings up "our reasons for doing things" and arrives at we have "causal influence." Again, I could just as well say the hurricane has "goals" and "motivations" and is causal.
The most interesting question lies in his definition of "causal." From passages later on, I see he uses it in two different ways. When he starts from low-level details being not causally comprehensive, he means the high-level features have low-level causal power: changing the results of wave function collapse. That's the only logical conclusion from his use of "comprehensive," and is the only way to interpret his later statements that reductionism is wrong and we need to consider high-level features to determine the future jointly with low-level details. However, when he describes humans as agents and can cause our own behaviors, and when he argues the usefulness of Aristotle's theory of causality, specifically the final cause, he means that high-level features have causal power in determining the future outcomes of the whole system -- high-level causal power -- not that they have low-level causal power. He even makes very specific clarifications later that the science still holds despite there being agency and free will, meaning that his definition of causal power is not altering results on the low-level. To summarize, in his Step Two as well as all of the ensuing chapters, his premise is that quantum physics is not low-level causally comprehensive, yet he arrives at the conclusion that high-level features are high-level causal: these two statements have no relations because his "causality" has two inconsistent meanings. This is the main reason his whole argument fails.
Given there are two different levels of causality, it's fine to also use the final cause and the design cause from Aristotle: they're quite similar to Daniel Dennett's intentional stance and design stance, in contrast to the physical stance corresponding to the low-level cause. There's nothing wrong with using them, but using one doesn't mean any other one is wrong, and quantum physics is not needed.
Armed with this clarification, it's easy to see where he's wrong about reductionism, which he makes a lot of arguments against. His idea is similar to Step Two above: low-level physics is not deterministic, therefore high-level phenomena is not completely caused by low-level physics (wrong here because quantum physics is complete); therefore we have room to interpret high-level features as causal to high-level phenomena; therefore high-level features have high-level causal power (wrong to conclude from the potential to the actual without evidence); therefore high-level features have low-level causal power (wrong to conflate high- and low-level); therefore reductionism is wrong. The last part is worth analyzing: within the ontological reductionist framework, low-level physics can have high-level causal power, which is understood as an approximate summary of low-level causation in aggregate. This is not in conflict with high-level features having high-level causal power, because they are just two ways of viewing the same thing. As an example, in thermodynamics we talk about temperature as a high-level feature. It has a high-level causal power, which is to transfer heat from high temperature to low temperature objects. This process is well-understood at the low-level physics: temperature is an aggregate way of talking about molecular motion, with high temperature corresponding to higher average speed of molecules moving around. The transfer of heat is molecules bumping each other, with faster molecules transferring kinetic energy to slower molecules. Talking about heat transfer does not invalidate understanding the molecules transferring kinetic energy. The moving molecules have low-level causal power as real as temperature having high-level causal power. This is another way of seeing how high-level features' causal power cannot reject ontological reductionism. By his account of reductionism here, he means ontological reductionism, and his rejection of it is wrong.
In later pages, the author continues to argue against reductionism in other ways, similar to "we lose sight" and his distinction of "the organism's neural circuits" and "the organism" quoted above. In those cases, it is clear that he has epistemological reductionism instead of ontological reductionism in mind. By mixing up these concepts, he borrows arguments against one to reject the other, so that he can say humans are causal agents not reducible to fundamental physics. However, the invalidity of epistemological reductionism is a well-established conclusion in science, for example, in condensed matter physics (see More Is Different by P. W. Anderson in 1972). It has nothing to do with the agency of biological organisms, and if the author were consistently making his arguments, he would have to let physical materials be causal agents as well.
An example early in the book on "agency" goes like this:
Individual worms can learn from their own experience and develop their own reasons for choosing one action over another in any given situation. An individual worm is no longer just an instance of an evolutionary lineage -- a preprogrammed drone rolling off the factory conveyor belt. It goes out into the world and develops its own agency, through the history of its own actions and its own experiences.
Suddenly we're talking about "learn," "experience," "develop their own reasons," and "choosing" here. Does creating a history of itself through actions and experiences, and then basing decision making on those imply "agency"? It seems the author is trying to distinguish "preprogrammed drone" with something that learns through actions, but that is a vague and useless distinction: humans have preprogrammed machines with algorithms that adaptively change how they interact with the world based on their history. A lot of simple control systems do that already, before we even need to get into machine learning or artificial intelligence. It's easy to interpret his statements to include human-made machines, or even natural non-biological phenomena: The hurricane is not a preprogrammed drone. It goes out into the world, interacts with houses, forests, land, cloud, hot and cold air, and through the history of its own actions and its own experiences, changes its course. As it interacts with the world along its path, its composition changes, which changes how it responds to environmental conditions such as air humidity, temperature, pressure, and flow. This is how it develops its own reasons for choosing one action over another in any given situation. The hurricane is an agent!
Again and again, the author writes about solid science in the previous paragraph, and in the next one the claim of agency occurs without justification. The conclusion that it's an agent is suddenly there, because every new mysterious concept he brings up presumes the agent.
In other places, the author tries to make some distinctions but fails to convince. For example,
In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding -- the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptually, we lose sight of the thing we're trying to explain.
The author seems to have serious misunderstandings of what "a machine computing inputs to produce outputs" means: this can describe most systems in the world, animate or inanimate (whatever the distinction is), and is not in conflict with "an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons." They can be two ways of describing the same thing, for different purposes. He does have a valid point here: epistemological reductionism is not helpful -- "we lose sight" -- but the way he presents the two opposites doesn't make sense. At the end of the book, he even mentions the importance of general systems theory, control theory, and cybernetics as moving away from (epistemological) reductionism, without realizing his contradiction and his misunderstanding of systems theory and control theory here. Same for differentiating "the organism's neural circuits" and "the organism," a confusing claim. He would be better served by saying it's not useful to view things reductively (against epistemological reductionism), but the conclusion he takes from here, that the integrated self has its own causal power outside of fundamental physics (against ontological reductionism), is questionable. Importantly, his distinction needs to be carefully analyzed by considering his definitions of causation and of reductionism, which I'll come to next.
On causation, the author rejects its possibility under determinism:
In ordinary parlance, when we identify something (X) as a cause of something else (Y), what we mean is that if X had not been the case, then Y would not have happened, assuming everything else in the scenario was unchanged. A cause in this way of thinking is a difference that makes a difference. But, again, this kind of counterfactual thinking simply does not apply in a deterministic universe: nothing could have been different, nor could individual causes be isolated from the general progression of events. Everything just happens.
This is wrong in the agreed understanding of general relativity. Everything doesn't just happen, even in a deterministic universe. They must happen in a specific sequence based on the laws of physics. Before talking about counterfactuals, we can view physics as laws of regularity instead of laws of counterfactual causation. The difference is that laws of regularity specify how a progression of events should be logically related: an event happened before means a later event must happen in a specific way, not in any other way. Metaphorically, we can think of Euclidean geometry: if the rule says there can only be straight lines, seeing a part of a straight line means knowing how it will extend infinitely both ways. This is the geometric interpretation of general relativity, and regularity holds in this deterministic universe. Moreover, counterfactual thinking is helpful here: if this part of the straight line were to tilt to a different angle, we know how it should be extending. This knowledge can be used if later on we do see a part of another straight line tilted in that different angle. The reason we can do counterfactual thinking is that general relativity is not only a description of the world, but can also be used to prescribe an imaginary world that doesn't exist; additionally, it is not only a law that we use to map out the entirety of the universe, but can also be used to approximately describe only local events. It's true that in this particular deterministic universe, nothing could have been different, but counterfactual thinking is not only about "what could have been different in this universe" -- it can also be about "what could have been different in another imagined universe"; additionally, it can also be about "what would happen elsewhen elsewhere in this universe" based on what's observed here and now. By denying the possibility of counterfactual thinking, the author is proclaiming necessitarianism, a much stronger form of metaphysics than determinism, and this is a distinction he fails to clarify. Thus, we already have two ways of defining causality under determinism: by regularity and by counterfactuals, both valid and useful in a deterministic universe. Without this realization, it's no wonder the author has to resort to quantum indeterminism to look for causation.
Quantum indeterminism is the main basis of causation and agency the author builds on. In addition to the problem explained above, his arguments also wrongly conflates low- and high-level causality. I will skip his useless random side notes, some of them wrong, on chaos and quantum fluctuations (no distinctions made between deterministic chaos and quantum chaos, or between unpredictability and indeterminism), and present his conclusion:
The low-level physical details and forces are not causally comprehensive: they are not sufficient to determine how a system will evolve from state to state. This opens the door for higher-level features to have some causal influence in determining which way the physical system will evolve. This influence is exerted by establishing contextual constraints: in other words, the way the system is organized can also do some causal work. In the brain, that organization embodies knowledge, beliefs, goals, and motivations -- our reasons for doing things. This means some things are driven neither by necessity nor by chance; instead, they are up to us.
There are three steps here:
Step One: Quantum physics is not deterministic, therefore it is not causally comprehensive.
Step Two: Therefore, higher-level features can also be causal.
Step Three: Therefore, we are causal.
All of them are questionable. For Step One, indeterminism doesn't mean not causally comprehensive. The whole debate in quantum theory over the last century has been whether it is a complete theory, meaning no other factors outside of this theory can be used to better predict the outcome. Currently, the physics community agrees that quantum mechanics, or more precisely the Standard Model that incapsulates several Quantum Field Theories, is complete or can comprehensively explain everything except where quantum gravity is needed, which is not relevant for studying the human brain. For Step Two, the existence of the "causal work" of "contextual constraints" is suspicious. Not only does he go from the potential ("opens the door") to the actual ("can also do") without evidence, but this "causal work" is also contradictory to quantum physics. If quantum physics were not causauly comprehensive and other causal factors exist, such causal work of higher-level features would mean they can have an impact on the statistical outcomes of the collapse of wave functions, which is not supported by experiments. For Step Three, going from some high-level system to brain, he uses the same trick as before: starting from the solid science of quantum physics, he brings up "our reasons for doing things" and arrives at we have "causal influence." Again, I could just as well say the hurricane has "goals" and "motivations" and is causal.
The most interesting question lies in his definition of "causal." From passages later on, I see he uses it in two different ways. When he starts from low-level details being not causally comprehensive, he means the high-level features have low-level causal power: changing the results of wave function collapse. That's the only logical conclusion from his use of "comprehensive," and is the only way to interpret his later statements that reductionism is wrong and we need to consider high-level features to determine the future jointly with low-level details. However, when he describes humans as agents and can cause our own behaviors, and when he argues the usefulness of Aristotle's theory of causality, specifically the final cause, he means that high-level features have causal power in determining the future outcomes of the whole system -- high-level causal power -- not that they have low-level causal power. He even makes very specific clarifications later that the science still holds despite there being agency and free will, meaning that his definition of causal power is not altering results on the low-level. To summarize, in his Step Two as well as all of the ensuing chapters, his premise is that quantum physics is not low-level causally comprehensive, yet he arrives at the conclusion that high-level features are high-level causal: these two statements have no relations because his "causality" has two inconsistent meanings. This is the main reason his whole argument fails.
Given there are two different levels of causality, it's fine to also use the final cause and the design cause from Aristotle: they're quite similar to Daniel Dennett's intentional stance and design stance, in contrast to the physical stance corresponding to the low-level cause. There's nothing wrong with using them, but using one doesn't mean any other one is wrong, and quantum physics is not needed.
Armed with this clarification, it's easy to see where he's wrong about reductionism, which he makes a lot of arguments against. His idea is similar to Step Two above: low-level physics is not deterministic, therefore high-level phenomena is not completely caused by low-level physics (wrong here because quantum physics is complete); therefore we have room to interpret high-level features as causal to high-level phenomena; therefore high-level features have high-level causal power (wrong to conclude from the potential to the actual without evidence); therefore high-level features have low-level causal power (wrong to conflate high- and low-level); therefore reductionism is wrong. The last part is worth analyzing: within the ontological reductionist framework, low-level physics can have high-level causal power, which is understood as an approximate summary of low-level causation in aggregate. This is not in conflict with high-level features having high-level causal power, because they are just two ways of viewing the same thing. As an example, in thermodynamics we talk about temperature as a high-level feature. It has a high-level causal power, which is to transfer heat from high temperature to low temperature objects. This process is well-understood at the low-level physics: temperature is an aggregate way of talking about molecular motion, with high temperature corresponding to higher average speed of molecules moving around. The transfer of heat is molecules bumping each other, with faster molecules transferring kinetic energy to slower molecules. Talking about heat transfer does not invalidate understanding the molecules transferring kinetic energy. The moving molecules have low-level causal power as real as temperature having high-level causal power. This is another way of seeing how high-level features' causal power cannot reject ontological reductionism. By his account of reductionism here, he means ontological reductionism, and his rejection of it is wrong.
In later pages, the author continues to argue against reductionism in other ways, similar to "we lose sight" and his distinction of "the organism's neural circuits" and "the organism" quoted above. In those cases, it is clear that he has epistemological reductionism instead of ontological reductionism in mind. By mixing up these concepts, he borrows arguments against one to reject the other, so that he can say humans are causal agents not reducible to fundamental physics. However, the invalidity of epistemological reductionism is a well-established conclusion in science, for example, in condensed matter physics (see More Is Different by P. W. Anderson in 1972). It has nothing to do with the agency of biological organisms, and if the author were consistently making his arguments, he would have to let physical materials be causal agents as well.
December 30, 2023
Este ano foi fértil na luta entre os defensores do determinismo e os do livre-arbítrio, com o livro "Determined" (2023) de Sapolsky a defender o primeiro, e o livro de Kevin Mitchell, "Free Agents" (2023), o segundo. Ambos são neurocientistas, Sapolsky na Universidade de Stanford, Mitchell no Trinity College de Dublin. Sobre o primeiro livro, já aqui dei conta, sobre o segundo, aconselho a leiturada da síntese de Bailey para a Reason. A meio de "Free Agents", cansei-me totalmente desta discussão. Já me tinha saturado com Sapolsky, mas agora decidi mesmo não voltar tão depressa a este tema. Cada lado dedica-se apenas e só a listar exaustivamente pontos que consideram essenciais e que demonstram como a razão está do seu lado. Contudo, a culpa não é deles, é do debate, do quão desprovido de sentido está.
O texto continua no blog: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2023/...
O texto continua no blog: https://narrativax.blogspot.com/2023/...
January 19, 2024
I liked the book, there was a lot of interesting stuff about the evolution of cognition and consciousness starting from single-celled creatures. The main point of the book, I guess, is re-hashing the battle over Free Will. (His position is pro Free Will.) Some of his points are interesting but I’m not convinced and I’m getting increasingly certain that the whole conflict is useless and that nobody’s definition of “Free Will” is really the same anyway. But despite that the book was enjoyable and educational.
I liked the author’s first book “Innate” even more - it explains the process of how identical twins grow up to be different from each other, even though their DNA is identical and even if their upbringing and childhood experiences are very similar.
I liked the author’s first book “Innate” even more - it explains the process of how identical twins grow up to be different from each other, even though their DNA is identical and even if their upbringing and childhood experiences are very similar.
February 14, 2024
I read this as a counterpoint to Sapolsky's Determined which takes the opposite point of view, as a response to a kinda-sorta challenge from my brother in law.
The best thing about the book is it starts with the big issue I thought Sapolsky overlooked--what is free will, and what is meant by an agent that has free will. That's hugely helpful and produces interesting insights along the way--such as, it's hard to talk about an action if you don't have an agent causing that action. Without that, you just have rocks banging into each other. When we talk about an action we assume intent and purpose.
For that, Mitchell defines an organism not as a physical entity--because the physical elements can and do get swapped out over time--but as a collection of coordinated processes that perpetuate themselves over time, keeping themselves separate from the universe at large. That then gives us a locus for intent--the organism wants to perpetuate itself, and ultimately, can make decisions about how best to do so.
Mitchell reviews the evolutionary process from single-cell organisms through the development of nervous systems and eventually the human brain. This is long but interesting in itself and, more important for his argument, is useful to show in some detail how choice and decision-making are instantiated in the meatware of the brain. He's also got a good bit about how choice and creativity can come out of this meatware, through elements that propose choices semi-randomly and other elements that evaluate and choose--rather like how random mutation and natural selection work together in evolution itself.
This also creates a use for the concepts of randomness at the quantum level and of chaotic systems. Fundamental randomness means the system isn't predictable, even in theory; and the brain being a chaotic system means even without the randomness we wouldn't be able to predict any particular outcome. Because he considers the organism to be exactly the emergent, interacting processes rather than the physical neurons, this provides a way to talk about choice and free will that's based on the material brain without being bound by it.
But his weakest argument, I think, is when he talks about those elements as providing "space for" free will even within a system bound by physical laws. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Randomness is still randomness, and doesn't make for will of any sort. Randomness feeding a decision-making apparatus still produces a result based on that apparatus which, predictable or not, doesn't obviously mean it is capable of choosing differently than it did.
He does make a convincing argument that all these mechanisms, as a complex, chaotic system in the technical sense, produce an organism whose behavior can't be predicted. The only way to know what it will do is to let it go and see what it did do. Is that free will? Maybe?
It's similar to an argument CS Lewis (and Milton) made about God's foreknowledge. If God foresees all, does that eliminate free will? No, says Lewis. To see someone do something is not to make them do it, even if you see it in advance. Even if time is laid out like the Bayeux Tapestry, God is just looking at it, not making all the decisions along the way.
Maybe deterministic reality is like that--yeah, it could be laid out like the tapestry, every event fixed in eternity. But every event only happens as it did/does/will because of the choices made by the causal agents along the way, and those choices were the embodiment of their will. To see something happen is not to make it happen.
The best thing about the book is it starts with the big issue I thought Sapolsky overlooked--what is free will, and what is meant by an agent that has free will. That's hugely helpful and produces interesting insights along the way--such as, it's hard to talk about an action if you don't have an agent causing that action. Without that, you just have rocks banging into each other. When we talk about an action we assume intent and purpose.
For that, Mitchell defines an organism not as a physical entity--because the physical elements can and do get swapped out over time--but as a collection of coordinated processes that perpetuate themselves over time, keeping themselves separate from the universe at large. That then gives us a locus for intent--the organism wants to perpetuate itself, and ultimately, can make decisions about how best to do so.
Mitchell reviews the evolutionary process from single-cell organisms through the development of nervous systems and eventually the human brain. This is long but interesting in itself and, more important for his argument, is useful to show in some detail how choice and decision-making are instantiated in the meatware of the brain. He's also got a good bit about how choice and creativity can come out of this meatware, through elements that propose choices semi-randomly and other elements that evaluate and choose--rather like how random mutation and natural selection work together in evolution itself.
This also creates a use for the concepts of randomness at the quantum level and of chaotic systems. Fundamental randomness means the system isn't predictable, even in theory; and the brain being a chaotic system means even without the randomness we wouldn't be able to predict any particular outcome. Because he considers the organism to be exactly the emergent, interacting processes rather than the physical neurons, this provides a way to talk about choice and free will that's based on the material brain without being bound by it.
But his weakest argument, I think, is when he talks about those elements as providing "space for" free will even within a system bound by physical laws. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. Randomness is still randomness, and doesn't make for will of any sort. Randomness feeding a decision-making apparatus still produces a result based on that apparatus which, predictable or not, doesn't obviously mean it is capable of choosing differently than it did.
He does make a convincing argument that all these mechanisms, as a complex, chaotic system in the technical sense, produce an organism whose behavior can't be predicted. The only way to know what it will do is to let it go and see what it did do. Is that free will? Maybe?
It's similar to an argument CS Lewis (and Milton) made about God's foreknowledge. If God foresees all, does that eliminate free will? No, says Lewis. To see someone do something is not to make them do it, even if you see it in advance. Even if time is laid out like the Bayeux Tapestry, God is just looking at it, not making all the decisions along the way.
Maybe deterministic reality is like that--yeah, it could be laid out like the tapestry, every event fixed in eternity. But every event only happens as it did/does/will because of the choices made by the causal agents along the way, and those choices were the embodiment of their will. To see something happen is not to make it happen.
August 18, 2024
Un libro interesante en que el autor intenta, aunque personalmente creo que no logra, definir que si tenemos libre albedrío desde un punto de vista biológicos. Creo que muichos de sus argumentos principales no son sostenibles ni siquiera por los mismos datos que el entrega. pero es un muy buen libro para alguienque se quiere acerca a la biologìa, la mente y la consciencia
R.
R.
October 18, 2023
Una buena lectura complementaria es The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans de Michael Tomasello.
January 17, 2024
I really enjoyed this book AND I have a complaint about it. It presents an interesting and coherent view of life's evolutionary history through the lens of living things as "agents", autonomous goal-directed actors. It's a strong rebuke to the reductionist view of life where living things are driven by their smallest or component parts, dominated by the bottom-up causation of biochemistry, of genes, etc. An analogy might be made to the absurdity of trying to explain an economy in terms of the physics of the atoms on cargo ships. You don't get the *meaning* of the cargo by just looking at the atoms -- or the meaning of animal behavior or intelligence by just looking at the neurochemistry. So, not a revolutionary idea, but I don't think I've read it laid out quite this neatly or understandably. Or so well connected to evolutionary biology.
My complaint is that the central argument against many concepts of free will is insufficiently addressed. There are sections on free will, but if I read it correctly they boil down to "if you accept the X interpretation of quantum mechanics, then the universe has true randomness, therefore determinism is false". Which ok, but A) why accept that interpretation and B) how does randomness at the quantum level impart a concept of free will to one's neurochemistry? A second bolstering argument is presented along information-theoretical lines, that information about the world has finite precision which necessarily leaves room for the future to be truly unknowable. But like -- the concept of "precision" in the sense used is a *model* we use to describe things right? We don't think there are actually bits out there representing an atom's velocity do we? I am continually hopeful to be convinced that free will exists because of some aspect of at the smallest level but this book did not deliver that convincingly to me. I'd love to hear the author expound on that topic at greater length!
The last chapter of the book was a really good one. It's interesting to hear what evolutionary biology has to say about AI, which could be quite a lot.
My complaint is that the central argument against many concepts of free will is insufficiently addressed. There are sections on free will, but if I read it correctly they boil down to "if you accept the X interpretation of quantum mechanics, then the universe has true randomness, therefore determinism is false". Which ok, but A) why accept that interpretation and B) how does randomness at the quantum level impart a concept of free will to one's neurochemistry? A second bolstering argument is presented along information-theoretical lines, that information about the world has finite precision which necessarily leaves room for the future to be truly unknowable. But like -- the concept of "precision" in the sense used is a *model* we use to describe things right? We don't think there are actually bits out there representing an atom's velocity do we? I am continually hopeful to be convinced that free will exists because of some aspect of at the smallest level but this book did not deliver that convincingly to me. I'd love to hear the author expound on that topic at greater length!
The last chapter of the book was a really good one. It's interesting to hear what evolutionary biology has to say about AI, which could be quite a lot.
June 19, 2024
1) This book is way too long for its purpose. There are a lot of absolutely unnecessary details about molecular biology and neuroscience throughout the book. Do the readers really need to know the detailed mechanism of action potential generation in neurons in order to understand the theses about free will advanced by the author? I don't think so.
2) This book is not about the philosophical question of free will or about fundamental questions surrounding free will (the possibility of free will, physical determinism and whether it might be compatible with some version of a free will, etc.). A convinced hard determinist will find nothing in this book to challenge their views. They can instead read the book as explaining why the illusion of free will seems so convincing.
3) In the rare instances where the author does address fundamental questions about the possibility of free will, he is sloppy and wholly unconvincing. There's at least one major factual error in the book that is illustrative in this respect. In Chapter 7, the author claims that the so-called Bell tests rule out hidden-variables interpretations of quantum mechanics. But, this is wrong: these experiments only rule out local hidden-variables theories; they do not and cannot rule out Bohmian non-local hidden-variables theories and crucially these Bohmian interpretations of quantum mechanics are completely deterministic. In the same chapter, the author also tries to rely on highly speculative (i.e. very likely wrong) ideas by some contemporary physicists (Smolin, Gisin, Del Santo) to argue why any quantum indeterminacy might be relevant at classical scales as well, but being highly speculative, these are also ultimately unconvincing.
4) I found the remaining parts of the book largely uncontroversial, but somewhat trivial. This also includes long discussions of top-down causation, which I think is mostly orthogonal to fundamental issues surrounding free will and determinism.
2) This book is not about the philosophical question of free will or about fundamental questions surrounding free will (the possibility of free will, physical determinism and whether it might be compatible with some version of a free will, etc.). A convinced hard determinist will find nothing in this book to challenge their views. They can instead read the book as explaining why the illusion of free will seems so convincing.
3) In the rare instances where the author does address fundamental questions about the possibility of free will, he is sloppy and wholly unconvincing. There's at least one major factual error in the book that is illustrative in this respect. In Chapter 7, the author claims that the so-called Bell tests rule out hidden-variables interpretations of quantum mechanics. But, this is wrong: these experiments only rule out local hidden-variables theories; they do not and cannot rule out Bohmian non-local hidden-variables theories and crucially these Bohmian interpretations of quantum mechanics are completely deterministic. In the same chapter, the author also tries to rely on highly speculative (i.e. very likely wrong) ideas by some contemporary physicists (Smolin, Gisin, Del Santo) to argue why any quantum indeterminacy might be relevant at classical scales as well, but being highly speculative, these are also ultimately unconvincing.
4) I found the remaining parts of the book largely uncontroversial, but somewhat trivial. This also includes long discussions of top-down causation, which I think is mostly orthogonal to fundamental issues surrounding free will and determinism.
November 27, 2023
Contra la concepción dominante, un reputado hombre de ciencia acaba de defender el libre albedrío en clave darwinista en un libro tan heterodoxo como fascinante. Así lo proclama Kevin J. Mitchell en Free agents: "Para mí, se trata de una idea no sólo errónea, sino también equivocada. Un enfoque de la vida puramente reduccionista y mecanicista pierde por completo la perspectiva".
Y prosigue: "Al contrario, las leyes básicas de la física que tratan sólo de la energía, la materia y las fuerzas fundamentales no pueden explicar qué es la vida o su propiedad definitoria: los organismos vivos hacen cosas por razones, como agentes causales por derecho propio. No los impulsa la energía sino la información. Mi objetivo es explorar cómo los seres vivos llegan a tener esta capacidad de elegir, de controlar de forma autónoma su propio comportamiento y de actuar como causas en el mundo. La clave de este esfuerzo, en mi opinión, es adoptar una perspectiva evolutiva".
Mitchell guía a los lectores a través de milenios de evolución, de la fisiología del cerebro y de una miríada de ideas filosóficas sobre la agencia humana para ilustrar cómo surgió en organismos complejos. "No pueden entenderse como máquinas estáticas o disposiciones instantáneas de materia", afirma. "Más bien, son patrones de procesos dinámicos entrelazados que persisten activamente a través del tiempo".
Según su libro, las presiones de la selección natural para sobrevivir y reproducirse impulsaron procesos insensibles y no dirigidos que aumentaron la complejidad de la vida. Así, la agencia se facilita a través de mecanismos físicos: actuamos por razones, y estas razones surgen del conjunto de nuestras experiencias, de los fines que nos hemos fijado a través de la metacognición, de nuestras inclinaciones innatas y del conjunto de opciones disponibles para nosotros en cualquier situación.
https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historia...
Y prosigue: "Al contrario, las leyes básicas de la física que tratan sólo de la energía, la materia y las fuerzas fundamentales no pueden explicar qué es la vida o su propiedad definitoria: los organismos vivos hacen cosas por razones, como agentes causales por derecho propio. No los impulsa la energía sino la información. Mi objetivo es explorar cómo los seres vivos llegan a tener esta capacidad de elegir, de controlar de forma autónoma su propio comportamiento y de actuar como causas en el mundo. La clave de este esfuerzo, en mi opinión, es adoptar una perspectiva evolutiva".
Mitchell guía a los lectores a través de milenios de evolución, de la fisiología del cerebro y de una miríada de ideas filosóficas sobre la agencia humana para ilustrar cómo surgió en organismos complejos. "No pueden entenderse como máquinas estáticas o disposiciones instantáneas de materia", afirma. "Más bien, son patrones de procesos dinámicos entrelazados que persisten activamente a través del tiempo".
Según su libro, las presiones de la selección natural para sobrevivir y reproducirse impulsaron procesos insensibles y no dirigidos que aumentaron la complejidad de la vida. Así, la agencia se facilita a través de mecanismos físicos: actuamos por razones, y estas razones surgen del conjunto de nuestras experiencias, de los fines que nos hemos fijado a través de la metacognición, de nuestras inclinaciones innatas y del conjunto de opciones disponibles para nosotros en cualquier situación.
https://www.elmundo.es/papel/historia...
September 16, 2023
3+/4-
Author Kevin Mitchell defines his goal for Free Agents twice, and these are very different expressions. In the Preface he rejects a mechanistic approach and asserts that living organisms do things as causal agents driven by information, and he aims to “explore how living things come to have this ability to choose, to autonomously control their own behavior, to act as causes in the world.” In the final chapter, he says his goal is “to present a naturalistic framework for thinking about agency and free will”, which involves “a reframing of some fundamental philosophical issues, including the nature of causation, time, information, meaning, purpose, and selfhood.”
As a professor of genetics and neuroscience, Mitchell is well equipped to take on this difficult question. The book acknowledges and builds on the work of many others in the cognitive and philosophical realms, like Steve Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Antonio Damasio as well as numerous biologists and physicists like Erwin Schrodinger and Sean Carroll.
Mitchell’s exploration of the source of free will goes back to the very beginnings of life and includes some rather deep science that will make it more appropriate for the science lover than the philosophy fan. If your eyes glaze over when you read, “ Simple life forms like bacteria have a protein… called ATP synthase…. It acts as a channel through which H+ ions from the outside can pass to the inside. As they pass through, they power the mechanism of the ATP synthase, which takes a molecule of adenosine with only two phosphate groups attached to it (ADP) and adds a third (to make ATP)”, this book might not be right for you or at least you might want to skip to the final chapters on Thinking about Thinking and Free Will or the epilog on Artificial Agents. These are thoughtful and stimulating but not so heavy on the biological science.
For the right audience it is a fascinating read.
I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss and Princeton University Press.
Author Kevin Mitchell defines his goal for Free Agents twice, and these are very different expressions. In the Preface he rejects a mechanistic approach and asserts that living organisms do things as causal agents driven by information, and he aims to “explore how living things come to have this ability to choose, to autonomously control their own behavior, to act as causes in the world.” In the final chapter, he says his goal is “to present a naturalistic framework for thinking about agency and free will”, which involves “a reframing of some fundamental philosophical issues, including the nature of causation, time, information, meaning, purpose, and selfhood.”
As a professor of genetics and neuroscience, Mitchell is well equipped to take on this difficult question. The book acknowledges and builds on the work of many others in the cognitive and philosophical realms, like Steve Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and Antonio Damasio as well as numerous biologists and physicists like Erwin Schrodinger and Sean Carroll.
Mitchell’s exploration of the source of free will goes back to the very beginnings of life and includes some rather deep science that will make it more appropriate for the science lover than the philosophy fan. If your eyes glaze over when you read, “ Simple life forms like bacteria have a protein… called ATP synthase…. It acts as a channel through which H+ ions from the outside can pass to the inside. As they pass through, they power the mechanism of the ATP synthase, which takes a molecule of adenosine with only two phosphate groups attached to it (ADP) and adds a third (to make ATP)”, this book might not be right for you or at least you might want to skip to the final chapters on Thinking about Thinking and Free Will or the epilog on Artificial Agents. These are thoughtful and stimulating but not so heavy on the biological science.
For the right audience it is a fascinating read.
I received an advance review copy of this book from Edelweiss and Princeton University Press.
June 4, 2024
Took away a lot from this book.
Does it ‘prove’ that free will exists? It depends on your definition of the term.
If ‘free will’ has to be something immaterial which has an effect on the material world, without being itself affected by material objects, that’s an impossibly high bar. After all, how can some immaterial thing make decisions about the material world without encountering it? It’s through experience that we communicate with the world. If our decisions weren’t partly determined by experience, we could only act blindly and at random.
Equipped with knowledge of our environment, we needs reasons (aka a will) for choosing between possible actions. We prefer certain outcomes over others and choose actions which are most likely to result in that outcome. Mitchell describes how those reasons are supplied to us by evolution.
Do we lack free will if our reasons for choosing certain actions over others are determined by evolution?
Well our will has to come from somewhere. We shouldn’t expect a will to emerge from the ether with a preference for oranges over apples, without the experience to know what an apple is.
Does ‘free will’ require us to will what we will? And do we need to be able to change that higher will at will? It’s incoherent to imagine a will without prior causes. The best we could possibly do is something like our meta-cognition, which Mitchell describes in detail.
The book reframes the conversation in a much more productive way.
I wasn’t convinced that determinism, with a bit of quantum randomness, isn’t in some sense true. However, that idea is only true in a very shallow pedantic sense.
Saying that ‘free will’ doesn’t exist is like saying that some particular fish doesn’t exist. You could (if you had an infinite amount of time to perform the calculations) determine the probability of the fish’s next state based on the state of every sub-atomic particle in that fish. It’d just be a really stupid way to waste an infinite amount of time. And if you were off about the location or the spin of one of those particles, you’d have to go recalculate the whole thing.
Or we could treat the fish as a fish. Unlike free will though, there aren’t lots of people making arguments about how fish don’t really exist.
We should understand people as agents who make decisions for reasons which they are almost always consciously aware of. As people who are capable of logic, self-reflection and higher order thinking.
Does it ‘prove’ that free will exists? It depends on your definition of the term.
If ‘free will’ has to be something immaterial which has an effect on the material world, without being itself affected by material objects, that’s an impossibly high bar. After all, how can some immaterial thing make decisions about the material world without encountering it? It’s through experience that we communicate with the world. If our decisions weren’t partly determined by experience, we could only act blindly and at random.
Equipped with knowledge of our environment, we needs reasons (aka a will) for choosing between possible actions. We prefer certain outcomes over others and choose actions which are most likely to result in that outcome. Mitchell describes how those reasons are supplied to us by evolution.
Do we lack free will if our reasons for choosing certain actions over others are determined by evolution?
Well our will has to come from somewhere. We shouldn’t expect a will to emerge from the ether with a preference for oranges over apples, without the experience to know what an apple is.
Does ‘free will’ require us to will what we will? And do we need to be able to change that higher will at will? It’s incoherent to imagine a will without prior causes. The best we could possibly do is something like our meta-cognition, which Mitchell describes in detail.
The book reframes the conversation in a much more productive way.
I wasn’t convinced that determinism, with a bit of quantum randomness, isn’t in some sense true. However, that idea is only true in a very shallow pedantic sense.
Saying that ‘free will’ doesn’t exist is like saying that some particular fish doesn’t exist. You could (if you had an infinite amount of time to perform the calculations) determine the probability of the fish’s next state based on the state of every sub-atomic particle in that fish. It’d just be a really stupid way to waste an infinite amount of time. And if you were off about the location or the spin of one of those particles, you’d have to go recalculate the whole thing.
Or we could treat the fish as a fish. Unlike free will though, there aren’t lots of people making arguments about how fish don’t really exist.
We should understand people as agents who make decisions for reasons which they are almost always consciously aware of. As people who are capable of logic, self-reflection and higher order thinking.
October 18, 2023
While maybe the most exhaustive defense of free will that I’ve ever read, I found his argument ultimately unconvincing. Although the author states that this was written with a layperson in mind, I don’t think the end result hits that mark.
November 13, 2023
I'm unsure why, but I've long been interested in the topic of free will. I made one of my rare suggestions that Portsmouth (NH) Public Library buy this book, and they acceded. As you can tell from the title, it's pro-free will. (But to be fair, I also have Robert Sapolsky's recent anti-free will book Determined on my "get" list.)
There's a blurb on the back from Steven Pinker:
Kevin Mitchell brings clear thinking and scientific rigor to a vital topic that leaves many people confused, caught between the preposterous alternatives that either humans are robots or that every time we make a decision, a miracle occurs.
That's a pretty good summary. Mitchell is a professor at Trinity College (Dublin) in the Genetics and Neuroscience department. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the long and tedious process by which evolution developed ever-increasingly complex neural systems for survival advantage. To be honest, my eyes glazed over in a number of spots. (Page 73: "We already saw transient multicellular behavior in the slugs and fruiting bodies formed by the aggregation of individual Dictyostelium amoebas. This kind of aggregative multicellularity is observed in many other species, across diverse groups of eukaryotes, and even in some bacteria called myxobacteria." OK, if you say so.)
I confess that pro-free will authors are pushing on an open door in my case. But Mitchell's argument here is careful and (seemingly) fair to the other side. He's even reluctant to provide his Official Definition of free will; I think the closest he gets is (page 282): "If free will is the capacity for conscious, rational, control of our actions, then I am happy in saying we have it." That works for me.
I believe Mitchell is making a strong science-justified claim roughly similar to the psychological argument made by Ken Sheldon in Freely Determined; there's a "hierarchy of human reality". At the lowest level, there's the physics and chemistry of interacting atoms and molecules; moving up, there's increasing complexity in cells, organs, and "systems". And it proceeds upward into relationships, society, and culture. Determinists only see causality working bottom-up: it's just those atoms bumping into each other that cause everything else. Mitchell and Sheldon say no: causality works top-down too. Specifically, your cognitive functions can work their will on the lower level too. And that means (ta-da) free will.
The usual disclaimer: ardent determinists and zealous free-willers (I'm pretty sure) are united in their beliefs having absolutely no effect in how they run their everyday lives. To use a common example: they pick out which shirt to wear in the morning, neither thinking too much about it, nor waiting until the molecules in their body do whatever they were predestined to do anyway.
Minor nit: Mitchell says (page 29) that the hydrogen nucleus "comprises a single proton and a single neutron." Ack, no: it's just a proton. (I assume he's right about everything else, though.)
January 25, 2024
According to physicist Brian Greene, free will might all be a grand illusion – it’s really just the sensation of making a choice. Though the sensation is real, the choice itself is governed by the laws of physics, not by our own agency.
This grand illusion has a name: determinism. Determinism can be described in many ways – whether it's the rigid physical laws governing particles and energy, the cascading of events like falling dominoes, or the intricate dance of genes and biology. But they all suggest that the future is already written, like a puppeteer pulling the strings of our existence.
Once the text got into the evolution of cognition
The sense of self and choice
I struggled to remain interested
My would be 3 star rating fell to 2
I gained interest again around, “Whenever we overrule emotions, habits, biases, and randomness with our higher-order thinking, simulation, and logical deliberation, we exercise our free will. We consciously examine the roots of feelings and may choose to alter our reactions by reframing the subconscious narratives that guide us.”
So 2.5=3
Overall, free will depends on an evolutionary chain from metabolism and agency up to consciousness and selfhood. While some argue that our choices are merely results of sensory inputs mechanically driving our behaviors, the story is more complex. As we evolved more and more sophisticated methods of sensing, processing, choosing, reflecting, and acting in adaptive goal-directed ways, we developed newer, higher-order faculties like simulation and self-awareness, which is difficult to account for without a notion of free will. Human thought and behavior bridle randomness to sculpt character and direct actions from an inner sense of identity. Determinism alone cannot fully predict or explain this.
This grand illusion has a name: determinism. Determinism can be described in many ways – whether it's the rigid physical laws governing particles and energy, the cascading of events like falling dominoes, or the intricate dance of genes and biology. But they all suggest that the future is already written, like a puppeteer pulling the strings of our existence.
Once the text got into the evolution of cognition
The sense of self and choice
I struggled to remain interested
My would be 3 star rating fell to 2
I gained interest again around, “Whenever we overrule emotions, habits, biases, and randomness with our higher-order thinking, simulation, and logical deliberation, we exercise our free will. We consciously examine the roots of feelings and may choose to alter our reactions by reframing the subconscious narratives that guide us.”
So 2.5=3
Overall, free will depends on an evolutionary chain from metabolism and agency up to consciousness and selfhood. While some argue that our choices are merely results of sensory inputs mechanically driving our behaviors, the story is more complex. As we evolved more and more sophisticated methods of sensing, processing, choosing, reflecting, and acting in adaptive goal-directed ways, we developed newer, higher-order faculties like simulation and self-awareness, which is difficult to account for without a notion of free will. Human thought and behavior bridle randomness to sculpt character and direct actions from an inner sense of identity. Determinism alone cannot fully predict or explain this.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 22, 2024
i’m not a fan of declaring any opposing views/findings/facts as wrong without some sort of objective views/findings/facts that supports such disagreement.
to do so, blatantly, repeatedly before even finishing chapter 1 while conspicuously doing so in a quasi passive-aggressive manner as well kinda turns me off.
it comes across as a childish rebuttal like
“i know you are but what am i?”
this book, to me and/or in my opinion, does both in various combinations throughout the book.
i was hoping to read 2 books on the opposite sides of the spectrum regarding “free will” or determinism with this book being on one side.
unfortunately, i will continue my search for elsewhere for that side of the spectrum 😕
to do so, blatantly, repeatedly before even finishing chapter 1 while conspicuously doing so in a quasi passive-aggressive manner as well kinda turns me off.
it comes across as a childish rebuttal like
“i know you are but what am i?”
this book, to me and/or in my opinion, does both in various combinations throughout the book.
i was hoping to read 2 books on the opposite sides of the spectrum regarding “free will” or determinism with this book being on one side.
unfortunately, i will continue my search for elsewhere for that side of the spectrum 😕
January 24, 2024
"Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" by Kevin J. Mitchell explores the intriguing questions surrounding human autonomy and the existence of free will. The book takes readers on a knowledge-rich journey, prompting contemplation on the factors that influence beliefs, decisions, and the capacity for change over time.
The discussion begins by addressing the age-old debate of determinism versus free will, drawing parallels from video games where characters make choices within preprogrammed scenarios. The author introduces the concept of determinism, suggesting that the laws of physics govern our choices, raising questions about whether humans are mere puppets in a pre-written future.
The exploration delves into the complexity of defining free will, acknowledging the challenge of grasping its essence. The debate surrounding free will often intertwines with religious and moral motivations, emphasizing the need to approach the topic with an awareness of diverse perspectives and biases.
The narrative shifts to the fundamental question of life and the blurred boundary between life and non-life. Physicists define life as an ongoing process of maintaining order against entropy. The book describes the evolution of life from molecules near geothermal vents to the emergence of complex biomolecules like RNA and DNA. This journey sets the stage for understanding the goals, values, and interests that emerge in living organisms, hinting at the roots of agency.
Organisms, even simple ones, exhibit a basic form of agency by responding to environmental stimuli. The narrative traces the evolutionary path from sensing the environment to purposeful responses, emphasizing survival instincts. The concept of information exchange among organisms, seen even in bacteria, lays the groundwork for rudimentary agency.
The evolution of cognition becomes a focal point, with the emergence of neurons coordinating sensory information. The book explores the development of reflexes, mediating neurons, and the ability to simulate potential outcomes. The integration of past learning and the projection into the future set the stage for intentional decision-making, suggesting a progression from reactive agency to deliberate volition.
The narrative takes a fascinating turn into the world of quantum physics, challenging strict determinism by introducing intrinsic uncertainties. The two-stage model of action selection is discussed, where initial automated phases are followed by secondary rational phases. This model implies that individuals can harness randomness for arbitrary decisions, providing a glimpse into the existence of free will.
The book concludes by addressing the influence of nature and nurture on personality and character. It acknowledges the constraints imposed by genetics and neurobiology but emphasizes that individuals have the capacity to shape their narratives and influence their own personalities and characters.
In summary, "Free Agents" navigates through the intricate realms of determinism, evolution, cognition, and quantum physics to unravel the mysteries of free will. The narrative suggests that free will is a product of an evolutionary chain, from basic agency to consciousness and selfhood, challenging the notion of a predetermined future. The author contends that human thought and behavior, guided by an inner sense of identity, cannot be fully explained by determinism alone. The book leaves readers with the provocative notion that the future of free will as a species is yet to be determined.
The discussion begins by addressing the age-old debate of determinism versus free will, drawing parallels from video games where characters make choices within preprogrammed scenarios. The author introduces the concept of determinism, suggesting that the laws of physics govern our choices, raising questions about whether humans are mere puppets in a pre-written future.
The exploration delves into the complexity of defining free will, acknowledging the challenge of grasping its essence. The debate surrounding free will often intertwines with religious and moral motivations, emphasizing the need to approach the topic with an awareness of diverse perspectives and biases.
The narrative shifts to the fundamental question of life and the blurred boundary between life and non-life. Physicists define life as an ongoing process of maintaining order against entropy. The book describes the evolution of life from molecules near geothermal vents to the emergence of complex biomolecules like RNA and DNA. This journey sets the stage for understanding the goals, values, and interests that emerge in living organisms, hinting at the roots of agency.
Organisms, even simple ones, exhibit a basic form of agency by responding to environmental stimuli. The narrative traces the evolutionary path from sensing the environment to purposeful responses, emphasizing survival instincts. The concept of information exchange among organisms, seen even in bacteria, lays the groundwork for rudimentary agency.
The evolution of cognition becomes a focal point, with the emergence of neurons coordinating sensory information. The book explores the development of reflexes, mediating neurons, and the ability to simulate potential outcomes. The integration of past learning and the projection into the future set the stage for intentional decision-making, suggesting a progression from reactive agency to deliberate volition.
The narrative takes a fascinating turn into the world of quantum physics, challenging strict determinism by introducing intrinsic uncertainties. The two-stage model of action selection is discussed, where initial automated phases are followed by secondary rational phases. This model implies that individuals can harness randomness for arbitrary decisions, providing a glimpse into the existence of free will.
The book concludes by addressing the influence of nature and nurture on personality and character. It acknowledges the constraints imposed by genetics and neurobiology but emphasizes that individuals have the capacity to shape their narratives and influence their own personalities and characters.
In summary, "Free Agents" navigates through the intricate realms of determinism, evolution, cognition, and quantum physics to unravel the mysteries of free will. The narrative suggests that free will is a product of an evolutionary chain, from basic agency to consciousness and selfhood, challenging the notion of a predetermined future. The author contends that human thought and behavior, guided by an inner sense of identity, cannot be fully explained by determinism alone. The book leaves readers with the provocative notion that the future of free will as a species is yet to be determined.
March 20, 2025
Summary: An argument based on the evidence of the development of nervous systems for the evolution of individual agency–free will.
Philosophers have long debated whether human beings have free will or are creatures determined by the various forces that impinge upon us. Then enter the neurobiologists who have been able to increasingly map the fine structures and neural networks of the brain. They have accounted for a vast array of animal and human behaviors For many in the field, they have concluded that ultimately, we only have the illusion of free will. We only think we are thinking and deciding.
Kevin J. Mitchell, while accepting the evidence of evolutionary neurobiology, argues otherwise. He believes there is evidence that human beings, and perhaps other species, have agency that is not an illusion but an evolved quality. There are at least two strands to his argument. First, he traces evolutionary history from single-celled organisms to human beings. The simplest organisms have sensory abilities oriented toward sustaining life (seeking nutrients) and avoiding harm (from poison to predators). Over several chapters he shows how, as multicellular organisms developed, giving way to more complex species, that sensory apparatus developed. Neural inputs fed into ganglia, and eventually a cerebral cortex. Increasingly complicated responses developed to the variety of inputs involving layered and connected neural networks. In human beings, this resulted in a large pre-frontal cortex with semantic capabilities carrying the possibilities of thought and meaning within the recursive and layered neural processes.
The other part of Mitchell’s argument is based on quantum effects and neural “noise” factors that introduce indeterminacy into the system. He argues that this creates room for choice in what might otherwise be a determined system. Combined with human evolution, this allows space for higher level thinking, consciousness of self, and real agency.
He also argues against an approach to freedom as a lack of prior influences on choice. He argues that we have greater freedom when we have access to these factors and can draw upon them. This means we enjoy degrees of free agency rather than some impossible “absolute freedom.”
Until reading Mitchell’s book, I thought there were only two major options. One is dualism which posits a non-material mind, consciousness, or soul interacting with the brain. The other is reductive materialism where we are our brains and agency is illusion. What Mitchell posits is a third option, cognitive realism, in which neural patterns comprising “thoughts” may have causal power based on what they “mean.”
As interesting as this is, I still can see this collapsing into reductive materialism. All of what he posits is rooted in material processes. All material is subject to quantum indeterminacy. Random probability is different from free agency.
Mitchell is still making a materialistic argument. While I recognize that philosophic dualism has its own challenges, not least that it is incapable of scientific proof, I found that Mitchell was dismissive of this long tradition of thought that has its own explanatory power in terms of what it means to be human. Mitchell relegates this to “the ghost in the machine” language, and in doing so thinks he has satisfactorily dismissed it. Yet I wonder if he has substituted material for non-material “ghosts.”
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
Philosophers have long debated whether human beings have free will or are creatures determined by the various forces that impinge upon us. Then enter the neurobiologists who have been able to increasingly map the fine structures and neural networks of the brain. They have accounted for a vast array of animal and human behaviors For many in the field, they have concluded that ultimately, we only have the illusion of free will. We only think we are thinking and deciding.
Kevin J. Mitchell, while accepting the evidence of evolutionary neurobiology, argues otherwise. He believes there is evidence that human beings, and perhaps other species, have agency that is not an illusion but an evolved quality. There are at least two strands to his argument. First, he traces evolutionary history from single-celled organisms to human beings. The simplest organisms have sensory abilities oriented toward sustaining life (seeking nutrients) and avoiding harm (from poison to predators). Over several chapters he shows how, as multicellular organisms developed, giving way to more complex species, that sensory apparatus developed. Neural inputs fed into ganglia, and eventually a cerebral cortex. Increasingly complicated responses developed to the variety of inputs involving layered and connected neural networks. In human beings, this resulted in a large pre-frontal cortex with semantic capabilities carrying the possibilities of thought and meaning within the recursive and layered neural processes.
The other part of Mitchell’s argument is based on quantum effects and neural “noise” factors that introduce indeterminacy into the system. He argues that this creates room for choice in what might otherwise be a determined system. Combined with human evolution, this allows space for higher level thinking, consciousness of self, and real agency.
He also argues against an approach to freedom as a lack of prior influences on choice. He argues that we have greater freedom when we have access to these factors and can draw upon them. This means we enjoy degrees of free agency rather than some impossible “absolute freedom.”
Until reading Mitchell’s book, I thought there were only two major options. One is dualism which posits a non-material mind, consciousness, or soul interacting with the brain. The other is reductive materialism where we are our brains and agency is illusion. What Mitchell posits is a third option, cognitive realism, in which neural patterns comprising “thoughts” may have causal power based on what they “mean.”
As interesting as this is, I still can see this collapsing into reductive materialism. All of what he posits is rooted in material processes. All material is subject to quantum indeterminacy. Random probability is different from free agency.
Mitchell is still making a materialistic argument. While I recognize that philosophic dualism has its own challenges, not least that it is incapable of scientific proof, I found that Mitchell was dismissive of this long tradition of thought that has its own explanatory power in terms of what it means to be human. Mitchell relegates this to “the ghost in the machine” language, and in doing so thinks he has satisfactorily dismissed it. Yet I wonder if he has substituted material for non-material “ghosts.”
____________________
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.
July 21, 2024
Tuo pačiu metu, kai Sapolskis išleido „Nulemta“, kitas neuromokslininkas – Kevin Mitchell – išleido jam antitezę – „Laisvieji veikėjai (angl. free agents). Kaip evoliucija mums suteikė laisvą valią“. Tad abi knygas, atsižvelgiant į dviejų biologų skirtingus požiūrius, natūraliai norisi lyginti tarpusavyje.
Visgi, yra esminis skirtumas dėl kurio kūriniai tampa nevisai palyginami. Sapolskis pasirenka tokį laisvos valios apibrėžimą, kuris negali būti nuginčytas – „parodyk man neuroną, kuris lėmė elgseną X ir kuris nebuvo paveiktas jokių ankstesnių veiksnių“. Tuo tarpu Mitchell‘is yra nuosaikesnis, jį domina tai, kokios rūšies laisvą valią mes turime, o ne tai, kokios rūšies laisvą valią mes norėtume turėti. Tai svarbu moralinės atsakomybės klausimams, kurie mus stumia į tam tikrą laisvos valios apibrėžimą, kurį mes, žmonės, „turime“ turėti, t.y. pilną atsakomybę už savo veiksmus.
Atitinkamai, Mitchell‘io argumentacija prasideda nuo gyvybės atsiradimo, vienaląsčių organizmų ir tolsta pirmyn iki žmogaus. Autoriaus teigimu jau pirmieji autonomiškai judantys organizmai turi pirmąją sprendimo priėmimo užuominą: sustoti ar judėti toliau?
Mitchell‘is, kaip ir Sapolskis, sutinka, kad mus veikia begalės įvairių veiksnių dėl kurių galima susidaryti įspūdį, kad mūsų tolimesni veiksmai nėra laisvi ir yra iš anksto nulemti. Tačiau priešingai Sapolskiui, Mitchell‘is teigia, kad šie efektai yra ne determinuojantys, o informuojantys, t.y. visa, kas nutiko anksčiau, yra naudojama kaip patirtis ir sukaupta informacija ateičiai modeliuoti ir sprendimams pasirinkti. Taigi, visa sukaupta informacija ir jos reikšmė yra esminis variklis veikimui ir sprendimų pasirinkimui. Mitchell‘is klausia – jeigu organizmas yra sukonfigūruotas taip, kad tiesiog atitinkamai reaguotų į specifiškas sąlygas, tuomet kokia yra proto (angl. mind) esmė? Jeigu visi tolimesni veiksniai išties yra nulemti, tuomet protas nėra reikalingas. Jo teigimu, aplinkos stimulas nesukuria vieno visada identiško atsako, nes atsakas priklauso nuo organizmo vidinių būsenų, kurios nuolat kinta. Galiausiai, ryšių tarp savęs ir aplinkos suvokimas reikalauja, kad organizmas save patirtų kaip priežastinį veikėją. Apibendrinant, Sapolskio teigimu, ankstesni įvykiai nulemia mūsų ateities veiksmus, tačiau, anot Mitchell, jie veikiau suteikia informacijos, kurios pagrindu mes priimame sprendimus kaip veikti. Taigi, nors ankstesni veiksmai bei patirtys ir apriboja mūsų pasirinkimus, ji tuo pačiu ir suteikia laisvę rinktis bei prisiimti atsakomybę už savo veiksmus.
5/5
“In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding – the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptually, we lose sight of the thing we're trying to explain.”
Visgi, yra esminis skirtumas dėl kurio kūriniai tampa nevisai palyginami. Sapolskis pasirenka tokį laisvos valios apibrėžimą, kuris negali būti nuginčytas – „parodyk man neuroną, kuris lėmė elgseną X ir kuris nebuvo paveiktas jokių ankstesnių veiksnių“. Tuo tarpu Mitchell‘is yra nuosaikesnis, jį domina tai, kokios rūšies laisvą valią mes turime, o ne tai, kokios rūšies laisvą valią mes norėtume turėti. Tai svarbu moralinės atsakomybės klausimams, kurie mus stumia į tam tikrą laisvos valios apibrėžimą, kurį mes, žmonės, „turime“ turėti, t.y. pilną atsakomybę už savo veiksmus.
Atitinkamai, Mitchell‘io argumentacija prasideda nuo gyvybės atsiradimo, vienaląsčių organizmų ir tolsta pirmyn iki žmogaus. Autoriaus teigimu jau pirmieji autonomiškai judantys organizmai turi pirmąją sprendimo priėmimo užuominą: sustoti ar judėti toliau?
Mitchell‘is, kaip ir Sapolskis, sutinka, kad mus veikia begalės įvairių veiksnių dėl kurių galima susidaryti įspūdį, kad mūsų tolimesni veiksmai nėra laisvi ir yra iš anksto nulemti. Tačiau priešingai Sapolskiui, Mitchell‘is teigia, kad šie efektai yra ne determinuojantys, o informuojantys, t.y. visa, kas nutiko anksčiau, yra naudojama kaip patirtis ir sukaupta informacija ateičiai modeliuoti ir sprendimams pasirinkti. Taigi, visa sukaupta informacija ir jos reikšmė yra esminis variklis veikimui ir sprendimų pasirinkimui. Mitchell‘is klausia – jeigu organizmas yra sukonfigūruotas taip, kad tiesiog atitinkamai reaguotų į specifiškas sąlygas, tuomet kokia yra proto (angl. mind) esmė? Jeigu visi tolimesni veiksniai išties yra nulemti, tuomet protas nėra reikalingas. Jo teigimu, aplinkos stimulas nesukuria vieno visada identiško atsako, nes atsakas priklauso nuo organizmo vidinių būsenų, kurios nuolat kinta. Galiausiai, ryšių tarp savęs ir aplinkos suvokimas reikalauja, kad organizmas save patirtų kaip priežastinį veikėją. Apibendrinant, Sapolskio teigimu, ankstesni įvykiai nulemia mūsų ateities veiksmus, tačiau, anot Mitchell, jie veikiau suteikia informacijos, kurios pagrindu mes priimame sprendimus kaip veikti. Taigi, nors ankstesni veiksmai bei patirtys ir apriboja mūsų pasirinkimus, ji tuo pačiu ir suteikia laisvę rinktis bei prisiimti atsakomybę už savo veiksmus.
5/5
“In a holistic sense, the organism's neural circuits are not deciding – the organism is deciding. It's not a machine computing inputs to produce outputs. It's an integrated self deciding what to do, based on its own reasons. Those reasons are derived from the meaning of all the various kinds of information that the organism has at hand, which is grounded in its past experience and used to imagine possible futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it's not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it's the self that decides. If we break them apart, even conceptually, we lose sight of the thing we're trying to explain.”
September 5, 2024
I often rolled my eyes at people listing books that "altered their brain chemistry." This book however may have actually achieved this goal. "Free Agents" is a complicated read, that requires a lot of attention and focus. It was not something I could easily complete in one sitting, not even in a week. But it was just excellent. While I'm not sure the author knocked down all the arguments brought forth by proponents of pure determinism, who refuse to acknowledge that any form of free will is possible, he did in my opinion leave a huge crater in that camp. The biggest value of this book is primarily in highlighting the limitations of experiments that presumably showed that free-will is not possible; not only did he show that those experiments return different results when better controls are in place, but he also pointed out which experiments failed replication efforts. The author is also very clear in distinguishing between responses in a pathological brain, vs responses in a non-impaired brain. While pathologies are very helpful in allowing us to understand a mental process, the results should not be generalized to the extent that other authors have. For e.g.: there is no doubt that our visual perception is imperfect: universal optical illusions have highlighted how our brains interpret shape and color but also make clear its limitations. However, we cannot and should not conclude that our visual cortex is useless or incapable of detecting shape and function; if that were the case we'd not be here. The fact that absolute free will is not possible is not a tragedy, on the contrary a limited free-will allows the existence of a self. The book may be a bit repetitive at times, and in this case I found it necessary. The information presented was dense and demanding, and re-iterating prior points was actually useful. I will leave below one a paragraph from the concluding chapter that best summarizes the author's thesis.
"In humans, a kind of cognitive exaptation seems to have occurred. Thinking may have evolved for controlling action. But the expansion of our neural resources and the recursive architecture of our cognitive systems gave us the ability to think about our thoughts. We internalized cognition to such an extent that it became its own world: what cognitive scientists Uta and Chris Frith have called a world of ideas. Our minds were set free. We are capable of open-ended, truly creative thought; of imagination; of entertaining fanciful notions and hypothetical futures; of creating art and music and science; and of abstract reasoning that has revealed the deepest laws and principles of the universe. And we don’t do this alone: the true power of human thought comes through collective interaction and cumulative culture. We share and accumulate knowledge and deeper understanding over generations, with young people easily grasping concepts that were literally unthinkable just decades earlier."
PS: the small epilogue on AI is also excellent and lists clear logical arguments about the limitations of limited AI, and the paths that are missing for creating a general AI (whether or not that's something we should ever do).
"In humans, a kind of cognitive exaptation seems to have occurred. Thinking may have evolved for controlling action. But the expansion of our neural resources and the recursive architecture of our cognitive systems gave us the ability to think about our thoughts. We internalized cognition to such an extent that it became its own world: what cognitive scientists Uta and Chris Frith have called a world of ideas. Our minds were set free. We are capable of open-ended, truly creative thought; of imagination; of entertaining fanciful notions and hypothetical futures; of creating art and music and science; and of abstract reasoning that has revealed the deepest laws and principles of the universe. And we don’t do this alone: the true power of human thought comes through collective interaction and cumulative culture. We share and accumulate knowledge and deeper understanding over generations, with young people easily grasping concepts that were literally unthinkable just decades earlier."
PS: the small epilogue on AI is also excellent and lists clear logical arguments about the limitations of limited AI, and the paths that are missing for creating a general AI (whether or not that's something we should ever do).
November 15, 2024
Agency and free will
Agency is a person who acts to produce a particular result, in this case free will. The author explores the concept of free will from a biological and evolutionary perspective and concludes that it is not an illusion but a real phenomenon that rose from the human brain and its evolutionary development. He challenges the deterministic view that believes that our actions are completely governed by genetics, environmental factors, and classical physics. The human brain is a complex system that has flexibility for conscious choice. This ability evolved in animals to make decisions based on past experiences, sensory inputs, and predictions of future outcomes. In humans, the nervous system evolved to grant us a degree of agency over our behavior. He emphasizes that while our choices are influenced by biology, they are not wholly determined by it, leaving room for agency. Our ability to reflect on our thoughts, intentions, and actions gives us the capacity to choose freely, rather than simply react to stimuli. Brain is not a deterministic machine, and unpredictability of neural activity and environmental influences offers flexibility in decision-making. According to Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposed by neurobiologist Giulio Tononi consciousness arises from integrated information generated by the causal interactions within the brain which may give rise to free will.
An octopus throws a curveball to inferences drawn from human studies. Some octopus species operate their arms without direct involvement of brain, and they have a high degree of autonomy due to nerve clusters called ganglia in each arm. Indeed, one major implication is that intelligence and life may be inextricably intertwined in ways that revolve around the concept of agency, but octopus appears to be an evolutionary accident.
The laws of quantum mechanics allow quantum uncertainty, which means that conscious observers may encounter randomness that breaks pure determinism. This randomness doesn’t lead to free will, but it introduces unpredictability. To outside observers, our choices might look like patterns influenced by quantum randomness rather than pure causally determined processes. This perspective could mean we are neither fully free nor fully bound by fate.
Agency is a person who acts to produce a particular result, in this case free will. The author explores the concept of free will from a biological and evolutionary perspective and concludes that it is not an illusion but a real phenomenon that rose from the human brain and its evolutionary development. He challenges the deterministic view that believes that our actions are completely governed by genetics, environmental factors, and classical physics. The human brain is a complex system that has flexibility for conscious choice. This ability evolved in animals to make decisions based on past experiences, sensory inputs, and predictions of future outcomes. In humans, the nervous system evolved to grant us a degree of agency over our behavior. He emphasizes that while our choices are influenced by biology, they are not wholly determined by it, leaving room for agency. Our ability to reflect on our thoughts, intentions, and actions gives us the capacity to choose freely, rather than simply react to stimuli. Brain is not a deterministic machine, and unpredictability of neural activity and environmental influences offers flexibility in decision-making. According to Integrated Information Theory (IIT) proposed by neurobiologist Giulio Tononi consciousness arises from integrated information generated by the causal interactions within the brain which may give rise to free will.
An octopus throws a curveball to inferences drawn from human studies. Some octopus species operate their arms without direct involvement of brain, and they have a high degree of autonomy due to nerve clusters called ganglia in each arm. Indeed, one major implication is that intelligence and life may be inextricably intertwined in ways that revolve around the concept of agency, but octopus appears to be an evolutionary accident.
The laws of quantum mechanics allow quantum uncertainty, which means that conscious observers may encounter randomness that breaks pure determinism. This randomness doesn’t lead to free will, but it introduces unpredictability. To outside observers, our choices might look like patterns influenced by quantum randomness rather than pure causally determined processes. This perspective could mean we are neither fully free nor fully bound by fate.
March 15, 2024
This gets five stars for its amazingly clear exposition of what's been going on in neuroscience. That said, it mostly misfires in trying to make its point about free will.
Mitchell is incongruous in how he opposes physical reductionism in trying to create some space for free will. He rightly points out that particles and fields know nothing about most things we think about. But on the other hand, he touts evolution as the force that "gave us" free will, when DNA doesn't know anything about most things we think about either.
Also, Mitchell almost completely avoids the role of consciousness in free will and the "hard problem" of how physical nerve networks can give rise to it. Most examples of what he uses to illustrate free will are conscious actions and behaviors. Evolutionists can argue sweepingly about how consciousness is probably good for survival via natural selection, but that argument is feeble given the great extent to which human consciousness goes beyond mere survival issues. Did Picasso have to paint quite so well to survive, or to help the species survive?
There's a deep irony here. The fossil-fuel-based global economic system, for instance, which goes far beyond issues of relative survivability of individuals, is leading not to global survival but actually to a great extinction event threatening the very life of the planet. Could a pre-conscious species have created Big Oil and electrical grids? Consciousness vis-a-vis survival has evidently proved a two-edged sword. What it has delivered far outstrips what the workings of natural selection could ever have promised.
Furthermore, neuroscience seems ill-suited to adjudications of free will. Neuroscience is all about correlations of nervous phenomena and human behavior and experience; and as we all know, correlation is not causation. Mitchell's free will claims ultimately rest on humanistic reflection rather than EEG-prompted scientific theorizing.
The brain is like a piano. A piano is absolutely essential for playing piano music. But qua mere instrument, it can't explain music, much less music theory or composition. That distinction is the takeaway from Mitchell's book. But we already knew that.
Mitchell is incongruous in how he opposes physical reductionism in trying to create some space for free will. He rightly points out that particles and fields know nothing about most things we think about. But on the other hand, he touts evolution as the force that "gave us" free will, when DNA doesn't know anything about most things we think about either.
Also, Mitchell almost completely avoids the role of consciousness in free will and the "hard problem" of how physical nerve networks can give rise to it. Most examples of what he uses to illustrate free will are conscious actions and behaviors. Evolutionists can argue sweepingly about how consciousness is probably good for survival via natural selection, but that argument is feeble given the great extent to which human consciousness goes beyond mere survival issues. Did Picasso have to paint quite so well to survive, or to help the species survive?
There's a deep irony here. The fossil-fuel-based global economic system, for instance, which goes far beyond issues of relative survivability of individuals, is leading not to global survival but actually to a great extinction event threatening the very life of the planet. Could a pre-conscious species have created Big Oil and electrical grids? Consciousness vis-a-vis survival has evidently proved a two-edged sword. What it has delivered far outstrips what the workings of natural selection could ever have promised.
Furthermore, neuroscience seems ill-suited to adjudications of free will. Neuroscience is all about correlations of nervous phenomena and human behavior and experience; and as we all know, correlation is not causation. Mitchell's free will claims ultimately rest on humanistic reflection rather than EEG-prompted scientific theorizing.
The brain is like a piano. A piano is absolutely essential for playing piano music. But qua mere instrument, it can't explain music, much less music theory or composition. That distinction is the takeaway from Mitchell's book. But we already knew that.
July 4, 2024
Nah, color me unconvinced. I came away from this book with a stronger belief than ever that we don't have free will and equally convinced that it doesn't matter and that we are all better off thinking and acting as if we do have free will. Mr. Mitchell would probably classify me as a Compatibilist.
Mr. Mitchell makes his case by pointing out that biological creatures act with intent and that acting with intent has been favored by natural selection and has become enormously more complex and layered in humans so that it adds up to free will. Nope. It just adds up to a chain of causation that still has a deterministic reductionist explantion. Quantum indeterminacy doesn't help him because it gets averaged out so that it effectively disappears at human size. I was equally unconvinced by his arguments based on structural cause, neural variability, the impossibility of encoding the history of all time into a momentary present, and on complex recursive circuits. I agree that there is an element of randomness built into neural circuitry and that randomness is necessary to create the variation required for natural selection and for learning, as a strategy for evading predators and as part of reaching an optimal game theoretic solution to situations where you meet the same player in multiple games. But randomness only implies a deterministic development of a randomness strategy. That's not free will. Still I thought that Mr. Mitchell came closest to making his case when discussing the possibility of free will as an emergent property of complex neural systems that include randomness as a feature.
In the end, Mr. Mitchell is just giving us a variation on the old watchmaker's analogy as the argument for intelligent design. If the complexity of our actions and our sense that we have free will tell us that we have free will, then surely we must have it. But I don't buy it when there is a viable counter-theory built from the ground up that shows that we don't have it.
Notwithstanding my final conclusion that all of Mr. Mitchell's positions fail, this is an interesting and well-argued book that makes the best case that it can for free will. It's certainly thought provoking. Too bad it's wrong.
Mr. Mitchell makes his case by pointing out that biological creatures act with intent and that acting with intent has been favored by natural selection and has become enormously more complex and layered in humans so that it adds up to free will. Nope. It just adds up to a chain of causation that still has a deterministic reductionist explantion. Quantum indeterminacy doesn't help him because it gets averaged out so that it effectively disappears at human size. I was equally unconvinced by his arguments based on structural cause, neural variability, the impossibility of encoding the history of all time into a momentary present, and on complex recursive circuits. I agree that there is an element of randomness built into neural circuitry and that randomness is necessary to create the variation required for natural selection and for learning, as a strategy for evading predators and as part of reaching an optimal game theoretic solution to situations where you meet the same player in multiple games. But randomness only implies a deterministic development of a randomness strategy. That's not free will. Still I thought that Mr. Mitchell came closest to making his case when discussing the possibility of free will as an emergent property of complex neural systems that include randomness as a feature.
In the end, Mr. Mitchell is just giving us a variation on the old watchmaker's analogy as the argument for intelligent design. If the complexity of our actions and our sense that we have free will tell us that we have free will, then surely we must have it. But I don't buy it when there is a viable counter-theory built from the ground up that shows that we don't have it.
Notwithstanding my final conclusion that all of Mr. Mitchell's positions fail, this is an interesting and well-argued book that makes the best case that it can for free will. It's certainly thought provoking. Too bad it's wrong.
January 24, 2024
Essentially explores a host of philosophical puzzles and scientific insights to better understand human volition and agency. Determinism alone cannot fully predict or explain this. Gets an extra star for the month python reference.
Determinism vs. free will
- The actions of the bartender are determined by your choice. In short, you have free will, but he doesn’t.
- Many seek to validate their religion or morality using free will as a cornerstone.
What is life?
- In the classic Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch, John Cleese insists to a shopkeeper that a clearly lifeless parrot is dead, while the shopkeeper vehemently claims it’s still alive. It's a hilarious scene that hints at a more profound point: The boundary between life and non-life isn't always crystal clear.
Sensing, analysing, and deciding
- What began as undirected movements evolved into taxis behaviors – oriented, purposeful responses to stimuli. The question arises: Does directed motion imply conscious choice, or is it merely a result of mechanistic reactions? Could awareness or intention have evolved from the simple sensing of and response to information?
The evolution of cognition
- In the evolutionary saga, the first neurons likely emerged in eukaryotic organisms.
- mediating neurons slow down reactions, allowing for the integration of more perceptual data, and enabling more considered actions. Instead of reacting to each sensory input in isolation, organisms take a step back and examine the whole scenario.
Random decision-making
- Quantum physics throws a curveball at physical predeterminism – the idea that there's only one timeline. It introduces intrinsic uncertainties, challenging the notion of a strictly predefined future. You’re likely aware of Schrödinger's cat. The moral of that story is that many or all states exist until the point at which they are measured, or the point of decision making. Then they collapse into a single reality.
- In several studies, electroencephalograms, which measure electrical activity in the brain, reveal that the moment of decision happens just before we're consciously aware of it.
Determinism vs. free will
- The actions of the bartender are determined by your choice. In short, you have free will, but he doesn’t.
- Many seek to validate their religion or morality using free will as a cornerstone.
What is life?
- In the classic Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch, John Cleese insists to a shopkeeper that a clearly lifeless parrot is dead, while the shopkeeper vehemently claims it’s still alive. It's a hilarious scene that hints at a more profound point: The boundary between life and non-life isn't always crystal clear.
Sensing, analysing, and deciding
- What began as undirected movements evolved into taxis behaviors – oriented, purposeful responses to stimuli. The question arises: Does directed motion imply conscious choice, or is it merely a result of mechanistic reactions? Could awareness or intention have evolved from the simple sensing of and response to information?
The evolution of cognition
- In the evolutionary saga, the first neurons likely emerged in eukaryotic organisms.
- mediating neurons slow down reactions, allowing for the integration of more perceptual data, and enabling more considered actions. Instead of reacting to each sensory input in isolation, organisms take a step back and examine the whole scenario.
Random decision-making
- Quantum physics throws a curveball at physical predeterminism – the idea that there's only one timeline. It introduces intrinsic uncertainties, challenging the notion of a strictly predefined future. You’re likely aware of Schrödinger's cat. The moral of that story is that many or all states exist until the point at which they are measured, or the point of decision making. Then they collapse into a single reality.
- In several studies, electroencephalograms, which measure electrical activity in the brain, reveal that the moment of decision happens just before we're consciously aware of it.
Read
April 4, 2024OK, maybe this is just me; but I came out of this book more convinced to the argument contrary to what it wants to make. I picked up this book to hopefully help pull myself out of the pit of the existential angst I found myself in after learning about the determinist's argument. By explaining the nitty-gritty of how life came to be in the first place, it succeeded in showing how mechanistic life really is, though not in a way which was unexpected by an author pursuing to come at this account from a purely materialistic view.
I learned more from this book about evolution than I initially expected to. The explanation on how our thinking isn't predetermined, but nevertheless predisposed, was wholly interesting to read, and something I'm sure is elaborated in his other book Innate, which I'll be sure to read through as well.
My favourite part of this book was the implications of the author's view to Artificial Intelligence. He started this book off with a sub-title named 'Robots with Personality' that was seemingly a mere analogy to what he was trying to explain. He said that if everyone made a robot with the same goals of survival and reproduction, that we would all still make radically different robot brains. This concept came to a cathartic ending with the epilogue 'Artificial Agents' where the framework outlined in the rest of the book comes to fruition in trying to understand how it could help with volition in our very technology; the last line of which will stick with me for a pretty long time.
Ultimately, I feel like I haven't comprehended the book as well as it was intended to be, and I won't pretend I did. I might have bit off a little more than I can chew with this one, and overestimated my intelligence. This is all to say that, yes, this is a deeply complex, philosophical, and technical read. One I find myself not competent enough or well read enough on the topic to be giving an out-of-5-stars rating on.
I learned more from this book about evolution than I initially expected to. The explanation on how our thinking isn't predetermined, but nevertheless predisposed, was wholly interesting to read, and something I'm sure is elaborated in his other book Innate, which I'll be sure to read through as well.
My favourite part of this book was the implications of the author's view to Artificial Intelligence. He started this book off with a sub-title named 'Robots with Personality' that was seemingly a mere analogy to what he was trying to explain. He said that if everyone made a robot with the same goals of survival and reproduction, that we would all still make radically different robot brains. This concept came to a cathartic ending with the epilogue 'Artificial Agents' where the framework outlined in the rest of the book comes to fruition in trying to understand how it could help with volition in our very technology; the last line of which will stick with me for a pretty long time.
Ultimately, I feel like I haven't comprehended the book as well as it was intended to be, and I won't pretend I did. I might have bit off a little more than I can chew with this one, and overestimated my intelligence. This is all to say that, yes, this is a deeply complex, philosophical, and technical read. One I find myself not competent enough or well read enough on the topic to be giving an out-of-5-stars rating on.
February 26, 2024
Review of “Free agents: how evolution gave us free will” Mitchell 2023
This is a wonderful book that covers many difficult areas relating to the human brain using language that is understandable by ordinary mortals. The author covers a huge amount of useful background in leading up to the titular subject of free will, but almost all of it is required (with perhaps one exception of the discussion in chapter 10 on psychological personality traits). But I do have a number of criticisms:
1) There are very few references. There is a bibliography of suggested sources of more information for each chapter at the end of the book, but only a small number of these are specifically referenced with footnotes in the text. There were quite a few places where I would like to have known the source of the information the author was quoting, but there was no reference given.
2) There is no specific mention of different “levels of description” of functionality in the brain. The topic is discussed indirectly in a number of places, and the impression strongly given that the author believes that there are different levels at which the functioning of the brain can be described, but I found it frustrating that there was no specific delineation of levels.
3) Consciousness was glossed over rather rapidly. There are several places in the early parts of the book that say that the distinction between conscious and subconscious processes will be covered later, but when the section on consciousness is finally reached in chapter 11, all it says is that “We are configured so that most of our cognitive processes operate subconsciously, with only certain types of information bubbling up to consciousness on a need-to-know basis.”
I have created a new website that contains proposals that cover these last two issues – see hierarchicalbrain.com
This is a wonderful book that covers many difficult areas relating to the human brain using language that is understandable by ordinary mortals. The author covers a huge amount of useful background in leading up to the titular subject of free will, but almost all of it is required (with perhaps one exception of the discussion in chapter 10 on psychological personality traits). But I do have a number of criticisms:
1) There are very few references. There is a bibliography of suggested sources of more information for each chapter at the end of the book, but only a small number of these are specifically referenced with footnotes in the text. There were quite a few places where I would like to have known the source of the information the author was quoting, but there was no reference given.
2) There is no specific mention of different “levels of description” of functionality in the brain. The topic is discussed indirectly in a number of places, and the impression strongly given that the author believes that there are different levels at which the functioning of the brain can be described, but I found it frustrating that there was no specific delineation of levels.
3) Consciousness was glossed over rather rapidly. There are several places in the early parts of the book that say that the distinction between conscious and subconscious processes will be covered later, but when the section on consciousness is finally reached in chapter 11, all it says is that “We are configured so that most of our cognitive processes operate subconsciously, with only certain types of information bubbling up to consciousness on a need-to-know basis.”
I have created a new website that contains proposals that cover these last two issues – see hierarchicalbrain.com
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