Mike's Notes
This book explains how the evolution of living things gave rise to free will.
"... a shift toward thinking about the brain as a complex dynamical system with emergent properties that defy reduction to simple elements." - Nicole Rust Transmitter
"Kevin Mitchell is associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. He studies the genetics of brain wiring and its relevance to variation in human faculties, psychiatric disease and perceptual conditions such as synesthesia. His current research focuses on the biology of agency and the nature of genetic and neural information.
Mitchell completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the genetic instructions that direct the development of the nervous system in the fruit fly, and his postdoctoral work at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, exploring the same topic in mice. He is the author of “Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are” and “Free agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.” He also writes the Wiring the Brain blog and is on X (formerly known as Twitter) @WiringtheBrain." - Transmitter
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17/05/2025
Player One: An edited excerpt from ‘Free Agents — How Evolution Gave Us
Free Will’
By: Kevin Mitchell
The Transmitter: 13/11/2023
In his new book, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell argues that, despite his
field’s mechanistic models of cognition, we are all “Player One” in the
game of life, the authors of our own actions.
Are we the authors of our own stories? Or is our apparent freedom of choice
really an illusion? These questions were brought home to me recently as I
was watching my son play a video game — one where you wander around an open
world, meeting interesting denizens of one type or another (and killing
quite a few of them). As I watched, his character entered a tavern and
approached the bartender, who offered a generic greeting. The game then
threw up some options for things you could say in reply to get information
about the prospects for fortune and glory in the surrounding
territory.
In this exchange, my son’s possibilities for action were limited by the
game, but he was really making choices among them, and these choices then
affected how the conversation went and what would subsequently unfold. His
decisions were based on his overall goal in the game, the tension between
his goals of taking some immediate action or to keep exploring, his need to
have enough information to make a decision with confidence, the risk of
biting off more than he could chew and losing his hard-won stuff: All these
considerations fed into the decisions he made. He had his reasons and he
acted on them, just like you or I do every day, all day long.
The bartender, in contrast, was not making choices. He was a classic
“non-player character,” an NPC. His responses were completely determined by
his programming: He had no degrees of freedom. His actions were merely the
inevitable outcome of a flow of electrons through the circuits of the game
console, constrained by the rules encoded in the software. Even the more
sophisticated NPCs in the game, including the monster that eventually
caramelized my son’s avatar, were similarly constrained. The monster’s
actions — even in the fast-moving melee — were determined by the software
programming and mediated by the electronic components in the console.
Thus the NPCs only appear to be making choices. They’re not autonomous
entities like us: They’re just a manifestation of lots of lines of code,
implemented in the physical structure of the computer chips. Their behavior
is entirely determined by the inputs they get and their preprogrammed
responses. We, in contrast, are causes of things in our own right. We have
agency: We make our own choices and are in charge of our own actions.
At least it seems that way. It certainly feels like we have “free will,”
like we make choices, like we are in control of our actions. That’s pretty
much what we do all day — go around making decisions about what to do. Some
are trivial, like what to have for breakfast; some are more meaningful, like
what to say or do in social or professional situations; and some are
momentous, like whether to accept a job offer or a marriage proposal. Some
we deliberate on consciously, and others we perform on autopilot—but we
still perform them. Of course, our options may be more or less constrained
(or informed) by all kinds of factors at any given moment, but generally we
feel like the authors of our own actions.
And we interpret other people’s behavior in terms of their reasons for
selecting different actions — their intentions, beliefs and desires that
make up the content of their mental states. We constantly analyze each
other’s motives and habits and character, looking for explanations and
predictors of their behavior and the decisions they make. Why people act the
way they do is ultimately the theme of most entertainment, from Dostoyevsky
to Big Brother. All this rests on the view that we are not just acted on —
we are actors. Things don’t just happen to us, in the way they happen to
rocks or spoons or electrons: We do things.
The problem is that if you think about this view for too long, it becomes
difficult to escape a discomfiting thought. After all, like the NPCs, our
decisions, however complex they may be, are mediated by the flow of
electrical ions through the circuits of our brains and thus are constrained
by our own “programming,” by how our circuits are configured. Unless you
invoke an immaterial soul or some other ethereal substance or force that is
really in charge — call it spirit or simply mind, if you prefer — you cannot
escape the fact that our consciousness and our behavior emerge from the
purely physical workings of the brain.
There is no shortage of evidence for this from our own experience. If
you’ve ever been drunk, for example, or even just a little tipsy, you’ve
experienced how altering the physical workings of your brain alters your
choices and the way you behave. There is a whole industry of recreational
drugs — from caffeine to crystal meth — that people take because of the way
that physically tweaking the brain’s machinery in various ways makes them
feel and act. The ultimate consequence in some cases is addiction — perhaps
the starkest example of how our actions can sometimes be out of our
control.
And, of course, if the machinery of your brain gets physically damaged — as
occurs with head injuries, strokes, brain tumors, neurodegenerative
disorders and a host of other kinds of insults — or its function is impaired
in other ways, as in conditions such as schizophrenia, depression and mania,
then your ability to choose your actions may also be impaired. In some
situations, the integrity of your very self may be compromised.
We all like to think that we are Player One in this game of life, but
perhaps we are just incredibly sophisticated NPCs. Our programming may be
complex and subtle enough to make it seem as if we are really making
decisions and choosing our own actions, but maybe we’re just fooling
ourselves. Perhaps “we” are just the manifestations of genetic and neural
codes, implemented in biological rather than computer hardware. Perhaps we
are the victims of a cruel joke, tragic figures in the grip of the Fates. As
Gnarls Barkley sang, “Who do you, who do you, who do you think you are? Ha
ha ha, bless your soul, you really think you’re in control.”
It’s hard not to look at the growing body of work from neuroscience and see
only the machine at work. Driving this circuit or that one either directly
causes an action or influences the cognitive operations that the animal —
mouse or human or anything else — uses to decide between actions. If we were
dissecting a robot in this way, we would apply engineering approaches to
understand the kinds of information being processed, the control mechanisms
configured into the different circuits and the computations that lead to one
output or another. There does not seem to be any need for something like a
mind in that discussion. There is no real need for life, for that
matter.
If the circuits just work on physical principles, then who cares what the
patterns of activity mean? Why does it matter what the mental content
associated with a particular pattern of neural activity is, if it is solely
the physical configuration of the circuitry that is going to determine what
happens next? We may have set out, as neuroscientists, to explain how the
workings of the brain generate or realize psychological phenomena, but we
are in danger of explaining those phenomena away.
”We make decisions, we choose, we act — we are causal forces in the
universe. These are the fundamental truths of our existence and absolutely
the most basic phenomenology of our lives."
If the neuroscientists have it bad, pity the poor physicists, whose
existential angst must run much deeper. Where neuroscientists can at least
hold onto the view that the circuits in the brain are doing things (whether
“you” are or not), some physicists claim that even that functionality is an
illusion. After all, the brain is made of molecules and atoms that must obey
the laws of physics, just like the molecules and atoms in any other bit of
matter.
These small bits of matter are pushed and pulled by all the forces acting
on them — gravity, electromagnetism, the so-called strong and weak nuclear
forces that hold atoms together — and where each atom goes is fully
determined by the way those interactions play out. These processes are no
doubt complicated, as they would be in any system with so many atoms
simultaneously acting on each other, and in practice how the system will
evolve is unpredictable — but it is still all driven by the physics. Even at
the lower levels of subatomic particles, how the system evolves is captured
by the equations of quantum mechanics in a way that many would argue
theoretically leaves no room for any other causes to be at play.
So, then, what does it matter what you are thinking? You cannot push the
atoms in your brain around with a thought. You cannot override the
fundamental laws of physics or exert some ghostly control over the basic
constituents of matter. According to this view, the very idea of mental
causation — of the content of your thoughts and beliefs and desires
mattering in some way — is a naive superstition, a conceptual hangover
inherited from philosophers like the famous dualist Rene Descartes.
I am not willing to give up on free will so easily. In this book I argue
that we really are agents. We make decisions, we choose, we act — we are
causal forces in the universe. These are the fundamental truths of our
existence and absolutely the most basic phenomenology of our lives. If
science seems to be suggesting otherwise, the correct response is not to
throw our hands up and say, “Well, I guess everything we thought about our
own existence is a laughable delusion.” It is to accept instead that there
is a deep mystery to be solved and to realize that we may need to question
the philosophical bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile
the clear existence of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical
universe.
But if we want to solve this mystery, humans are the absolute worst place
to start. It is a truism in biology to say that nothing makes sense except
in the light of evolution — and this is surely true of agency. Instead of
trying to understand it in its most complex form, I go back to its
beginnings and ask how it emerged, what the earliest building blocks were,
and what the basic concepts should be. How can we think about things like
purpose and value and meaning without sinking into mysticism or vague
metaphor? I argue that we can do so by locating these concepts in simpler
creatures and then following how they were elaborated over the course of
evolution, increasing in complexity and sophistication as certain branches
of life developed ever-greater autonomy and self-directedness.
Indeed, before tackling the question of free will in humans, we have a much
more fundamental problem to solve. How can any organism be said to do
anything? Most things in the universe don’t make choices. Most things — like
rocks or atoms or planets — don’t do anything at all, in fact. Things happen
to them, or near them, or in them, but they are not capable of action. But
you are. You are the type of thing that can take action, that can make
decisions, that can be a causal force in the world: You are an agent. And
humans are not unique in this capacity. All living things have some degree
of agency. That is their defining characteristic, what sets them apart from
the mostly lifeless, passive universe. Living beings are autonomous
entities, imbued with purpose and able to act on their own terms, not yoked
to every cause in their environment but causes in their own right.
To understand how this could be, we have to go right back to the beginning,
to the very origins of life itself. From the chemistry of rocks and
hydrothermal vents — the chemistry of the evolving planet itself — life
emerged as systems of interacting molecules, interlocked in dynamic patterns
that became self-sustaining. The ones that most robustly maintained their
own dynamic organization persisted, replicated, evolved. They became
enclosed in a membrane — a tiny subworld unto themselves — exchanging matter
and energy with their environment while protecting an internal economy and
reconfiguring their own metabolism to adapt to changing conditions. They
became autonomous entities, causally sheltered from the thermodynamic storm
outside and selected to persist.
A new trick was invented: action, the ability to move or affect things out
in the environment. Information became a valuable commodity, and mechanisms
evolved to gather it from the environment. With that came the crude
beginnings of value and meaning. Movement toward or away from various things
out in the world became good or bad for the persistence of the organism.
These responses were selected for and became wired into the biochemical
circuitry of simple creatures.
As multicellular creatures evolved, a class of cells — neurons — emerged
that specialized in transmitting and processing information. Initial
circuits acted as internal control systems, designed to coordinate the
various muscles or other moving parts of the multicellular animal and
defining a repertoire of useful actions. At the same time, neurons coupled
various sensory signals to specific actions in this repertoire, hardwiring
adaptive instincts for approach or avoidance.
With the elaboration of the nervous system, this kind of pragmatic meaning
eventually led to semantic representations. Perception and action were
decoupled by layers of intervening cells. Instead of being acted on singly
and immediately like a reflex, multiple sensory signals could be
simultaneously conveyed to central processing regions and operated on in a
common space. Circuits were built that integrated, amplified, compared,
filtered and otherwise processed those signals to extract information about
what was out in the world and what that meant for the organism. More and
more abstract concepts were extracted — not just things, but also types of
things and types of relations between them. Creatures capable of
understanding emerged.
Meaning became the driving force behind the choice of action by the
organism. That choice is real: The fundamental indeterminacy in the universe
means the future is not written. The low-level forces of physics by
themselves do not determine the next state of a complex system. In most
instances, even the details of the patterns of neural activity do not
actually matter and are filtered out in transmission. What matters is what
they mean — how they are interpreted by the criteria established in the
physical configuration of the system. Animals were now doing things for
reasons.
That causal power does not come for free: It is packed into the organism
through evolution, through development and through learning. It is encoded
in the genome by the actions of natural selection. And it is embodied in the
physical structure of the nervous system in the strength of neuronal
connections that express functional criteria in relation to a hierarchy of
aims of the organism. There is nothing here that violates the laws of
physics; it just demands a wider concept of causation over longer time
frames and an understanding that the dynamic organization of a system, which
encodes meaning, can constrain and direct the dynamics of its component
parts.
And yes, your actions are at any given moment constrained by all those
prior causes. Yet you could just as well say, more positively, that they are
informed by prior experience. That is precisely the property that sets life
apart from other types of matter: Living things literally incorporate their
history into their own physical structure to inform future action. For those
who would argue this impinges on the freedom of the self to decide at any
moment, I counter that it is this very process that enables the self to
exist at all. There is no self in a given moment: The self is defined by
persistence over time.
And though you are configured in a certain way that reflects all this
history, you are not hardwired. We humans have the remarkable capacity for
introspection and metacognition. We can inspect our own programming,
treating goals and beliefs and desires as cognitive objects that can be
recognized and manipulated. We can think about our own thoughts, reason
about our own reasons and communicate with each other through a shared
language. We can access the machine code running in our brains by
translating high-level abstract concepts into causally efficacious patterns
of neural activity. This gives a physical basis for how decisions are made
in real time, not just as the outcome of complex physical interactions but
also for consciously accessible reasons, and it provides a firm footing for
the otherwise troublesome concept of mental causation.
So, if you want to know what kind of thing you are, you are the kind of
thing that can decide. Not just a collection of atoms pushed around by the
laws of physics. Not a complex automaton whose movements are determined by
the patterns of electrical activity zipping through its circuits. And not an
NPC, unknowingly driven by its programming. You are a new type of thing in
the universe — a self, a causal agent. In the game of your life, you are
Player One.
