Kevin J. Mitchell - Free Agents - How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton University Press, 2023) *****

Earlier this year I read Robert Sapolsky's "Determined - Life Without Free Will" in which he argues that our idea of free will is only an illusion, and that any action our body takes is actually the result of hundreds of unconscious forces that work in it. Much earlier, I also read Sam Harris's "Free Will" which makes a very similar claim, although less substantiated and more philosophical. 

As a counter-argument I came across this delightful book by geneticist and neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and author of the blog "Wiring The Brain". 

In contrast to his blog, he does not take Sapolsky head-on in this book, but it's clear that some of the arguments come from refutations of some of Sapolsky's claims. Both books are well-documented, both are written by experts in their fields, and both come to different conclusions. Both agree that there is no 'immaterial I" that takes decisions, or that there is no mind-body duality. Both agree that many of our decisions are pre-determined by patterns of culture, genes, education, etc. They disagree whether this body can make any deliberate choice now, at this very moment, by weighing the pros and cons of certain actions. Sapolsky will say the choice is automatic. Mitchell will say that our neurons balance the options and our brain eventually makes a choice. That our body has "agency". 

Interestingly enough, the recent debate on this topic, and largely the spark that lit the fire for the books of Sapolsky, Harris and Mitchell goes back to an experiment conducted by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet in 1983. Mitchell also comes with a different interpretation on the methodology and the result of the data. 

I share a whole lot of text below, as examples of parts of his arguments. I can only recommend that you read the whole book. 

This question of morality is a topic that Sapolsky ends his book with. And the question is essential. Without free will, how can we make moral decisions? 

"Another barrier to a clear explication of the arguments around whether free will exists is that they are often approached from the direc­tion of their consequences for our positions on moral responsibility. If people are not really in control of their actions - if we are nothing more than physical automata, mounting a wonderfully sophisticated but ul­timately empty simulacrum of free will - then how can we be worthy of praise or blame? How can we defend judgment or punishment? The stakes here could not be higher. The idea of moral responsibility is the foundation not only of our legal systems but also of all our social interactions. We are constantly thinking about what we should or shouldn't do in any given circumstance and probably spend even more time thinking about what other people should or shouldn't do ( or should or shouldn't have done). But tying the discussion of free will to the issue of moral responsibility muddies the waters. Questions of moral responsibility are crucially important, of course, but they are confounded by all kinds of additional issues: the nature and origins of our moral sensibilities, the evolution of moral norms, the legal philosophies underpinning our justice systems, and the complex and innumerable pragmatic decisions that societies and individuals have to make to keep our collective existence stable. Ask­ing what kind of free will we want that will let us maintain our positions on moral responsibility can become almost a theological exercise in motivated reasoning" (p.17)

Mitchell goes very deep into the origin of our species and explains how even in the most basic forms of life, choices are made, obviously not conscious choice, but choices all the same. Even the very first cells, who function based on chemical reactions, start having options on how to proceed. The concept of 'information' as the basis for agency is essential to his thesis. 

"Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus-response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell's internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this 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 appropriate actions. This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior 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 behavior, 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." (p.62)

or a little further ...

"These simple organisms are not aware of those reasons. But it is still correct to say that the organism is doing something because it increases its chances of persistence. Or, at a finer level, that it is moving in a certain direction to get food or to escape a predator. It's right to think of various components and subsystems as having functions. And it's right to say the organism is acting on the basis of inferences about what is out in the world, rather than simply being triggered by external stimuli. The mecha­nisms are simply the means by which those goals are accomplished. Even these humble unicellular creatures thus have real autonomy and agency, as organized dynamic patterns of activity, causally insulated from their environment, and configured to maintain themselves through time. It is not merely that they hold themselves apart from the world outside: they act in the world and on the world in a goal-directed manner. They are causal agents in their own right. As evolution proceeds, the degree of autonomy increases-at least along some lineages, like the ones leading to humans. The tight coupling of perception and action is loosened. With the advent of multicellularity and especially the invention of nervous systems, additional layers of processing emerge. Organisms evolve the means to represent sensory in­formation internally without directly acting on it. More sophisticated control systems emerge for guiding action over longer timeframes. Organ­isms develop internal systems of evaluation that free them from the brutal, life-or-death judgment of natural selection. Crucially, all these systems are informational. Meaning becomes the currency of cognition." (p. 67)

The complexity of our bodies implies that our brains receive information from various sources inside and outside the body, information that needs to be integrated, balanced and decided upon based on neural hierarchies in the brain.  

"But the coupling between perception and action is at least loosened a bit. There are now some intermediate stages of processing-carried out by the middle layers of interneurons-during which multiple signals are integrated to allow the animal to respond to the situation as a whole, as opposed to independent stimuli. Specific interneurons collect signals from multiple sensory neurons responding to diverse aversive stim­uli, while other interneurons sum the activity of a different set of sen­sory neurons responsive to diverse attractive stimuli. The relative activ­ity of these interneurons is then itself integrated at another stage to determine whether the sum of attraction outweighs the sum of aversion. All of this is dependent on the context: responses to those integrated external sensory signals differ depending on the current internal state of the animal."(p.91)

 At a further stage, information becomes meaning. 

"When configured in this way, perceptual systems are not just pro­cessing information-they are extracting meaning. The patterns of neu­ral activity across different areas in the visual hierarchy represent the system's best guesses of what is out in the world, focused on what is most relevant and important for the survival of the organism. Those guesses are not merely passively computed through successive levels of information processing. The organism is actively, subjectively interpret­ing this information, bringing its prior experience and expectations to bear. (p.118)

In this sense, we are neither a machine nor is there a ghost in the machine. We are an organism that decides. 

"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. 

However, although we can reject a reductionist, purely mechanistic approach, that should not send us running in the other direction toward a nebulous, mysteriously nonphysical mind that is "in charge": the ghost in the machine. Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physi­cal brains, somehow directing the flow of electrical activity. The activity distributed across all those neural circuits produces or entails our mental experience ( and similarly for whatever kinds of mental experience other animals have). The meaning of those patterns for the organism has causal power based on how the system is physically configured. We can thus build a holistic physical conception of agency without either re­ducing it or mystifying it." (p. 144)

"This skepticism seems partly due to the enduring intellectual legacy of French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes, which has shaped the Western scientific tradition. One of Descartes's most famous ideas is that the world is made of two very different types of substance: the physical and the mental. This dualist position gets around having to explain how physical stuff can produce immaterial things like thoughts by simply positing that thoughts occupy a kind of parallel realm of the mental. The problem with this idea-pointed out by some of Descartes's contemporaries, such as the astute and wonderfully titled Elizabeth, Prin­cess of Bohemia - is that it does not explain how the physical and the mental realms can interact. They clearly seem to, because thinking about doing something can indeed lead to us doing it - physically moving our bodies and things in the world - but how? Descartes did not have a good answer to this question (though he did propose a route of communication through the pineal gland, for no particularly good reason). 

You would think we would have moved on by now, after four hun­dred years, but it seems we still get hung up on a version of the same question: How could having a conscious thought move physical stuff around? Doesn't that somehow violate the laws of physics? It seems to require a mysterious form of top-down causation in which the mental pushes the physical around. But this apparent mystery only arises if we think of the mental as some realm of free-floating thoughts and ideas. It's not a question of whether immaterial thoughts can push around physi­cal stuff. Thoughts are not immaterial: they are physically instantiated in patterns of neural activity in various parts of the brain, which can naturally have effects on how activity evolves in other regions. There's no need to posit a "ghost in the machine"-you're not haunting your own brain. The "ghost" is the machine at work." (p. 268)

 By accepting our free will as an evolutionary outcome that gives us powers no other animal has ever had, we also need a heightened sense of responsibility, anticipation and morality. 

"By being able to think at this level, we turn isolated elements of knowledge into a more general understanding of how the world works, something that artificial intelligence still struggles to do. And we can deploy that understanding in directing our own behavior, even in osten­sibly novel situations. We can combine these nested hierarchies of con­cepts and maps of causal relations and system dynamics in new, creative ways within this abstract cognitive space and thereby engage in open­ended, model-based reasoning. We can imagine things. In effect, we can mentally simulate a model of the world and "run" it in fast forward, predicting and evaluating outcomes of various actions over short and long timeframes. 

Our ability to model the world in this way gives us unprecedented control over our environments. When faced with some problem, we have the ability to see the bigger picture by taking into account a wider context and a longer time horizon. This means we can avoid getting stuck in local optima - the quickest, easiest solution to a local problem­and instead optimize for global parameters. We can think strategically, not just tactically." (p. 254)

Without a doubt Mitchell's book is more than welcome and was a great relief to have his substantiated arguments for free will. Even when Sapolsky argues that the absence of free will may be morally liberating, his concept still felt suffocating and utterly reductionist. Mitchell's arguments are scientifically sound and they offer us a much stronger and open foundation to start working on, both as an individual and as a society. 

I have the intense pleasure of seeing my four grandsons - between one month and four years old - learn about the world and their immediate environment. When I see them discover their feet (the youngest) or make choices when playing, or interacting with each other, the only thing I see are four distinct characters, exploring, choosing, reasoning, fantasising, enjoying themselves and the freedom they have to do this. They are not little machines who are fully determined by culture or genes. They are four individuals enjoying life (well ... OK, sometimes not). Their life is in front of them. They will make billions of choices in the future. That is what life offers them, what it offers us. 

Anybody interested in evolution, cognitive science, society and ethics should read this book. But don't trust me ... I am fully confident that you can do this based on your own free will.