FREE AGENTS; HOW EVOLUTION GAVE US FREE WILL

This book considers the question of free will. Much of its philosophical heavy-lifting (of which there is a lot), consists of reformulating the traditional question, e.g. denying that the answer is limited to either simplistic physical determinism, at the level of atoms or quantum fields, or to some kind of magical dualism. The author, Kevin Mitchell, argues that the way to escape these traditional, intellectual cul-de-sacs is to ‘ground’ the concepts of purpose, meaning, and value in a scientific conceptual framework which naturalises the concept of agency. He insists that these concepts, far from being unscientific; ‘… are crucial to understanding what life is, how true agency can exist, and what sorts of freedoms or limitations we actually have as human beings.’ (p. xi) And this book asserts that we really are free agents: ‘We make decisions, we choose, we act - we are casual forces in the universe. These are the fundamental truths of our existence.’ (p. 18) The question of free will does not have a yes-or-no, all-or-none answer. Rather, we have degrees of freedom: we have the ability to make choices, which means that our ‘actions are not simply determined by outside forces because we’re causally set apart from the rest of the universe to at least some degree. And, just as importantly, we are not driven by our own parts. Rather, we, holistically—our selves—are in charge.’ (p. 279)

Mitchell deconstructs the question ‘do we have free will’ by asking ‘Who is we? What does ‘free’ mean here?’ Ignoring this question fails to meet the challenge of physical determinism by merely sidestepping it with appeals to complexity and unpredictability. The reductive view of linear pathways, with dedicated components is revealed as an illusion.

Much of this question is encapsulated in the philosophical concept of ‘compatibilism’; The belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent. Mitchell suggests that compatibilism is the mainstream view of most scientists and philosophers; but it is unconvincing. He asks: ‘How can an agent be the real causal source of an action when everything that happens in the universe is fully determined by what happens at the lowest levels?’ (p. 153) He even suggests that the very concept of causation may be meaningless in a universe characterised by hard determinism: if everything is generated by endless causal chains, why arbitrarily label one link ‘cause’ and the next ‘effect’? Fortunately, these arguments fail, because this kind of determinism is refuted by quantum physics.

Mitchell points out that indeterminacy at the lowest levels can indeed introduce indeterminacy at higher levels. However, he concedes that just adding randomness doesn’t solve the problem. However, what the introduction of chance crucially contributes to free will is to undercut; ‘… necessity’s monopoly on causation. 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.’ (p. 163) This means that the organisation of the system can also do causal work: ‘This means some things are driven neither by necessity nor by chance; instead, they are up to us.’ (p. 164) Thus, physical indeterminacy creates ‘causal slack’, which opens the door for ‘top-down causation’.

So, if changes at the low-level have unpredictable impacts, then simple reductionism is not deterministic: something else is generating the space for agency. Mitchell claims that this ‘something else’ is the way the system is organised: this organisation evolves through time, driven by the patterns meaning in neural circuits, and this meaning arises from the history of interactions of the organism with its environment and is embodied in the patterns of synaptic connectivity between individual neurones.

So, the causal freedom of a system depends on the way it is configured. And, causation is not wholly instantaneous. Mitchell concludes that; ‘… if higher-order features and principles can exert causal power in a system - then causal determinism poses no threat to concepts of agency and free will. The agent itself can be the cause of something happening.’ (p. 165) This ability requires selfhood, which is defined by continuity through time, i.e. maintaining a certain dynamic pattern of processes in the face of thermodynamic pressure toward randomness.

As Mitchell points out, this is consistent with process philosophy (as promoted by Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson), which he defines as; ‘the view that processes, rather than static isolated objects or substances, are the fundamental elements of reality.’ (p. 291)

The book ends with a revealing discussion of AI in relation to free will. Mitchell observes that AI has been singularly unsuccessful at tasks which humans and many animals find easy, such as moving around in the world, understanding causal relations, or knowing what to do in novel situations. By way of explanation, Mitchell says that AI systems; ‘… may ‘know’ that when they see X, it is often followed by Y, but they may not know why that is: whether it reflects a true causal pattern or merely a statistical regularity, like night following day. They can thus make predictions for familiar types of data but often cannot translate that ability to other types or to novel situations.’ (p. 296) He points out how this differs from ‘biological intelligence’, which has; ‘… the ability to act appropriately in novel and uncertain environments by applying knowledge and understanding gained from past experience to predict the future, including the outcomes of their own possible actions.’ (p. 297) In addition, ‘biological intelligence’ has; ‘… the ability not just to arrive at an appropriate solution to a problem but to do so efficiently and quickly. Living organisms do not have the luxury of training on millions of data points, or running a system taking megawatts of power, or spending long periods of time exhaustively computing what to do.’ (p. 297)

Mitchell himself identifies the claim that the functional organisation of a system can have causal power as one of the book’s major themes. As per process philosophy, Mitchell concludes that: ‘These views are essentially holistic, even ecological: they consider the dynamics of a system in the context of all its relations, both internal and external. For a process as richly complex as life, this feels to me like the right approach.’ (p. 291)

About the author; Kevin Mitchell is a neurogeneticist interested in the relationships between genes, brains, and minds. He is a faculty member at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, in the departments of Genetics and Neuroscience. He writes the Wiring the Brain blog (www.wiringthebrain.com) and is on Twitter @WiringtheBrain.