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Kevin Mitchell is professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. He's been on the podcast before, and we talked a little about his previous book, Innate – How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are. He's back today to discuss his new book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. The book is written very well and guides the reader through a wide range of scientific knowledge and reasoning that undergirds Kevin's main take home: our free will comes from the fact that we are biological organisms, biological organisms have agency, and as that agency evolved to become more complex and layered, so does our ability to exert free will. We touch on a handful of topics in the book, like the idea of agency, how it came about at the origin of life, and how the complexity of kinds of agency, the richness of our agency, evolved as organisms became more complex.
We also discuss Kevin's reliance on the indeterminacy of the universe to tell his story, the underlying randomness at fundamental levels of physics. Although indeterminacy isn't necessary for ongoing free will, it is responsible for the capacity for free will to exist in the first place. We discuss the brain's ability to harness its own randomness when needed, creativity, whether and how it's possible to create something new, artificial free will, and lots more.
4:27 - From Innate to Free Agents
9:14 - Thinking of the whole organism
15:11 - Who the book is for
19:49 - What bothers Kevin
27:00 - Indeterminacy
30:08 - How it all began
33:08 - How indeterminacy helps
43:58 - Libet's free will experiments
50:36 - Creativity
59:16 - Selves, subjective experience, agency, and free will
1:10:04 - Levels of agency and free will
1:20:38 - How much free will can we have?
1:28:03 - Hierarchy of mind constraints
1:36:39 - Artificial agents and free will
1:42:57 - Next book?
