Free Agents

How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

By: Kevin J. Mitchell

Narrated by: Kevin J. Mitchell

Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook narrated by neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents 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 emerged 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 this matters.

©2023 Kevin J. Mitchell (P)2023 Princeton University Press

Critic reviews

“If you believe that free will is an illusion, you will change your mind after reading this irresistible book. Mitchell tells the epic story of the evolution of life from its origins to the emergence of purposeful behavior as you have never heard it before. He forcefully counters reductionism and makes a compelling case for agency as the central condition of living beings.”—Uta Frith, coauthor of What Makes Us Social?

Makes sense

I really enjoyed this book and very glad it was written. I recently read Determined, a book arguing that we have no free will. This book provides an eloquent and substantive counterpoint, and rings much more true, in my opinion. I really like how grounded in evolution it is, as nothing in biology makes sense without it. I am interested in reading everything this author has written as his thinking and writing is clear and his thoughts deep.

The best treatment of Free Will available today.

This book is an evolution of the long-held discussion of Free Will and Determinism. Firstly, as someone who enjoys science, this was a joy to read. "The story of Free Will is the story of Life" states the author, and beautifully moves through the related history of both.

If you've read Sapolsky or Dennet or Harris on free will, this will be an excellent rebuttal. If you've had a sense that they were missing something key about the nature of free will, this is a fleshed-out answer to their ignorance.

Dr. Mitchell puts muscle and bone to a framework that successfully synapses a hopeful response to a seemingly mechanistic universe. He does so with scientific rigor that is also free of unnecessary superstition or mysticism. This book is a triumph of thought and scholarship.

I'm grateful to have found this read, and for the author's courage and talent in bringing it to being. You will be too.

Adding Clarity to Agency

Agency is one of those topics that has proved nebulous and therefore prone to unrealistic simplifications like Cartesian Dualism (the self is a ghost steering neural activity separate from the brain) or reduction (you have no agency).

After listening to his audiobook, my takeaway is this: life is the structuring of an organism to take actions that preserve it. And for more complex life, we are structured to have a whole hierarchy of modifiable goals to drive behavior.

Decisions often take time, as we contemplate scenarios, payoff, and risks.

Planets have no agency - they succumb to the laws of physics. Life has agency because it has built into itself the use of the laws of physics to obey goals that it sets in place, and which can be refined by the experience within a lifetime.

I like his double reference to agency being like a helix or slinky through time - the agent's actions updating the environment which updates the agent's next move, etc. I like this because my own idea is that the perceptual spacetime in which stimuli are depicted to the 'self' network is drawn or referenced by a 'helix' tracing (for traveling/staggered unified brain activity; or 'frames' for standing waves of unified brain activity).

There are a ton of excellent ideas in this book, including the idea that primary cortices may serve two functions simultaneously (one, process the incoming stimuli; two, hold onto current context of consciousness and link it to incoming stimuli as needed/desired).

Best book out there on many topics

Terrific detailed and well-supported explanation of how living creatures evolve agency - and much more

Time to close the book on the free will debate

Well formed conceptual treatise replete with relevant examples, studies, and pop culture references. Convincingly details contextual freedom on various levels. As far as the reading goes, I thought it was an AI robot doing the reading but it turns out that it's the author.

wants his cake

so his basic argument is dualism is absurd - free will must emerg from the physical systems we comprise. but a complex physical system can be more than the sum of its parts so we can be confident "we" exert free will from some kind of top down structural influence which he calls "meaning". what? no support or explanation for what that mechanism is.

Details and language are not easily comprehensible

Difficult to follow. Too bad. The concepts were not presented in away easy to understand to a graduate school individual

Tough to get through

I have recently found myself in the "no free will" camp, and decided I haven't given the other side enough thought. This book only reinforced my current opinions. I listened to the whole book, wondering what he was actually calling free will because it seemed like he was confusing it with autonomy (he wasn't). Finally, in the last chapter he defines what he's calling free will. To not spoil anything, I'll just say; In my opinion it's a weak definition. He also seems to have a grievance with Sam Harris. He continually calls Sam out, but in my opinion he doesn't really understand Sam's arguments.