Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will Hardcover – October 3, 2023

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).

This book provides an excellent and well-written summary of current thought in free will, consciousness, and how the brain and mind really work. It's a great catalyst for discussion, and a jumping off point for further reflection, which I will do below.The author appears to define Free Will as the ability to do what you want, without constraint. ("You" is defined as BOTH your conscious and unconscious self. Take that, Sam Harris!)And while he admits that many human motivations are innate (and differ among us), the complexity of the brain's development, the indeterminancy of daily interaction with the environment, and the ability of the frontal cortex to align, plan, and override our impulses gives evidence of free agency.Not sure I agree. I differ from Donald Trump because we "want" different things, genetically or by some other cause. I was never free to want what I want. (Actually, I have a theory that an internal roulette wheel, and not genetic difference, is responsible for differences in most "wants.")"Wants" are goals and motivations. A goal-free life is basically death. So the brain balances a set of innate goals, along with innate constraints (e.g., don't bring shame on the family!) The fact that the frontal lobe has gotten pretty good at balancing competing innate goals isn't evidence of free will, per se.Also, I don't think the randomness of development and daily environments, as well as our randomized responses, means that innate goals aren't continually pursued, in the face of setbacks.As far as complexity and indeterminateness being responsible for free will, imagine that the mind is a DO loop:do { if detect(stimulus_x) and AI_policy(goal, current_state, stimulus(x))==suggested_action(y) and rand(10) > 5 then take(suggested_action(y)) }The fact that we're wired to choose among alternatives, using our internal ChatGPT or Reinforcement Learning engine to weigh actions and their possible rewards in various environments, with some randomness thrown in, doesn't mean we have free will.Sure, we can develop habits to override some of our innate motivations, but that is only for times when we're in control of our emotions, which isn't often, because why would we want to?We humans are evolved entities, but we are also purposeful agents. Therefore, some matter in the universe (humans) has purpose. A scientist can choose to design a new organism in a test tube. And if an evolved entity has purpose, it follows that evolution itself has purpose and consciousness (which has probably been the case for millions of years).That implies that Quantum Physics--that self-optimizing rendering engine for the simulation we all inhabit--has incorporated consciousness as a first class entity. In other words, the chain of causality of millions of years of evolution is more efficiently rendered, not by Newtonian physics or Quantum mechanics 1.0, but by new Quantum laws that render causaility different from other matter.You see what I did there? This book got me thinking outside the box!

Mitchell's book on agency is required reading for anyone engaged with the study of any life on Earth, including in the social sciences and humanities. Overly-coddled, positivist-mechanist disciplines (like engineering, with its tendency to fall into the predestination assumption due to method bias--because maths require closed equations, as well as due to the Baconian Counterenlightenment proscription against fully-specified causation) would do well to get right with biology's research findings too.Deploying up-to-date, authoritative biology findings, as well as presenting stunningly-incisive clarifications of physics theory, Mitchell meticulously assembles the highest philosophy-grade proof of agency and a crystal-clear clarification of what life is (and what sleep does, how we're built and so how we suffer, and more). This is the rare book in which most chapters are pure gold. I could put it down, but only to let it percolate. However, Mitchell leaves room for improvement in that his proof only counters anti-free will arguments based in mechanism, not sociability. When Mitchell moves from the biology and physics proof to two chapters of psychology (10-11), it gets less interesting, and the field of Psychology doesn't really maintain robust scientific standards, so these chapters don't really add to the anti-mechanist argument. In my field, Sociology, which like Biology can study complex life with an Enlightenment organicist science approach and can be opposed by positivist-mechanism, the defense of free will has to contend with a more substantial challenge to free will: When we foreground human sociability as an integral aspect of our organismal (individual) development and thriving, we recognize that how we organize our societies matters. By suppressing and appropriating organismal agency, a strongly hierarchical higher-order macro organization of social species can conflict with widespread organismal development and thriving, not just in our own species but across Terrestrian life. Because Mitchell doesn't inquire into the history of under what conditions the anti-free will argument arises (He broadly explains it as persistent Cartesian dualism), he doesn't notice that unequal and inegalitarian social conditions discount organismal development and thriving, and so blind us to biological and quantum physics knowledge, instead authorizing the renewed dissemination of mechanistic anti-free will arguments.It's a logical proof, but this book is also a lightning bolt. Maybe listen to it on Audible, but you need to buy the book and dig in. Mitchell's biological proof of agency is definitive and not to be ignored: Why would life develop so many, increasingly complex ways of perceiving, judging, and choosing for organismal persistence--exercising agency--if our world were not underdetermined? Thanks to Mitchell, the Enlightenment has possession of the ball again and its shot is on goal.Never before has someone put it together for me that physics has been wrestling over how to conceptualize evident underdetermination--the Enlightenment-Epicurean Swerve paradigm's allowance of fundamental underdetermination in our universe v. the likewise ancient Antienlightenment paradigm's hysterical cling to predetermination, from Democritus to mechanistic determinism and multi-universe determinism, popularized with the Cold War's Marvel franchise.

Worth reading. The question is addresses is: Do we do what do, and and be who are due to genetics... or culture: Nature vs Nurture. I did not agree with it all ... but good food for thought and discussion.