Free Agents How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

Despite millennia of arguments back and forth, the question of whether we have free will or not remains unresolved. I just reviewed Robert Sapolsky's Determined which presented a case against. Though successfully showing that we have less of it than we think, I remain unconvinced by his total rejection of free will. Here I turn to Kevin J. Mitchell's Free Agents which, also starting from neurobiology, presents a tightly argued and compelling case in favour.

Free Agents might test the patience of some readers as Mitchell only confronts the question of free will head-on in the last chapter. However, the book-length argument building up to it is very worthwhile, so I entreat you to stick with it. The first half of the book examines the history of life and the major transitions in evolution through the lens of neurobiology. This is followed by several chapters that further flesh out his argument and tackle metaphysical issues that supposedly negate free will.

Mitchell's retelling of life's history turns out to be a fascinating exercise with relevance far beyond the free will debate. In essence, he gives one possible answer to the question of what life is. Though I can only scratch the surface here, every chapter lobbed little intellectual firecrackers my way that went off in my head most satisfyingly. One example: single-celled organisms are insulated from the outside world and have to work constantly, through the process of metabolism, against entropy to maintain their internal organization. What this means is that "life is not a state, it is a process [...] persisting through time" (p. 26). That in turn births value and meaning: things matter to organisms relative to the goal of survival. Another example: an animal learns from its past by reinforcing neuronal connections that resulted in choices with good outcomes. Memories and habits are thus not stored elsewhere and consulted separately, they are "baked right into the decision-making machinery itself" (p. 141).

More intellectual firework comes with Mitchell's attempt to naturalize agency, i.e. to explain it in biological terms. A particularly heady chapter 9 explores this in-depth and draws on his previous book Innate. Concepts such as purpose, value, and meaning sound vague and immaterial. Not so, Mitchell says, they are made out of, instantiated in, biological matter. So, out of the window goes dualism. The value of a signal, whether it attracts or repels, resides not in the signal but in the response, which depends on how the neurons in the brain are wired. But reducing the system to just its components also misses the point. That only tells you how an action happens, not why. A signal might trigger a behaviour, but "it is the particular configuration of the organism that causes that signal to cause that behavior" (p. 67). In other words, "meaning drives the mechanisms. Acting for a reason is what living systems are physically set up to do" (p. 281). Organisms are not passively driven by outside signals, they interpret them, they are "meeting the world halfway, as an active partner in a dance that lasts a lifetime" (p. 217). This is the kind of academic poetry that blows my mind.

The parts of the book I found a bit iffy were chapters 7 and 8 where Mitchell discusses why he thinks the world is not fully deterministic. First, at the macro level of neural networks we find "general randomness and thermal fluctuations" (p. 189) that can generate useful random behaviours to e.g. break decision deadlocks or solve problems. Sapolsky will no doubt object that Mitchell confuses unpredictability and indeterminacy. Second, quantum mechanics. The upshot of these two effects would be that the universe is not predetermined which "opens the door for higher-level features to have some causal influence" (p. 164). How? If I understand Mitchell correctly, he envisions a form of top-down causation whereby the way the brain is organized constrains the lower-level components and influences how the system behaves.

So, what does all of this have to do with free will? Mitchell admits that much of what he discusses highlights constraints to free will, while his picture of indeterminacy generates opportunities for random behaviour that, while having their use, are not free will (as Sapolsky also pointed out). Where Mitchell deviates from Sapolsky is in concluding that such (useful) constraints shape rather than determine your behaviour. However, he is not convinced the question itself even makes sense. He thinks Sapolsky's demand for a causeless cause is "an unattainable standard [...] that could only be met by supernatural means" (p. 16). Similarly, he argues that absolutist definitions make no sense when taken to their logical conclusion. Why? Because he considers memories, knowledge, motivation, goals, etc. prior causes too, causing you to prioritize one action over another. These traits characterize you. If you had to be free from those as well, you would stop being you. Ultimately, he thinks the question of free will is a red herring and takes a pragmatic view: "If free will is the capacity for conscious, rational control of our actions, then I am happy in saying we have it" (p. 282). Organisms have evolved to do things for reasons. We might not always be free to choose those reasons, but we do have the capacity to reflect on them and we do have a degree of self-control. Rather than all-or-none, we have degrees of freedom. What free will is not, is a nebulous property: "It is an evolved biological function that depends on the proper functioning of a distributed set of neural resources" (p. 282).

So how do the two books compare and where do I now stand on the matter of free will? Ironically, both authors start from the same point, neurobiology, and show the same thing, behaviour is subject to prior constraints beyond our control. In my view, Sapolsky leaps from there to the incongruous conclusion that we have no free will at all, while Mitchell convincingly argues we do have some measure of control. I agree with Mitchell that much of the debate is rather frustrating, with participants not agreeing on definitions, going round in circles, and ultimately getting bogged down in semantics. Free Agents is a tightly argued and compelling case in favour of free will. Mitchell proves himself an able wordsmith who crams profound ideas in short sentences that benefit from reading and unpacking slowly. In its 299 sometimes dense and heady pages, it meanders less than Determined does. What made this book a spectacular read for me are the thought-provoking answers Mitchell provides to the question of what life actually is.