Kevin Mitchell, Professor of genetics at Trinity College Dublin, discusses his new book 'Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will'. Topics include the origin of agency, complexity of free will, indeterminacy in the universe, harnessing brain's randomness, creativity, and artificial free will.
Free will arises from a combination of indeterminacy and macroscopic organization.
Randomness can be a resource for adaptive behavior and creative thinking.
Constraints are integral to selfhood and meaningful decision-making.
Subjective awareness allows us to exercise free will based on past experiences and future aspirations.
Deep dives
The Emergence of Free Will
The podcast explores the emergence of free will and the concept of decision-making in organisms. It suggests that free will arises from a complex interplay between indeterminacy and macroscopic organization. Indeterminacy at the quantum level allows for multiple possibilities, while macroscopic organization constrains those possibilities and gives rise to agency. This agency allows organisms to control their behavior and make choices based on their goals and reasons. The podcast highlights the importance of historical processes, self-continuity through time, and the integration of past experiences and future plans in understanding free will.
Utilizing Randomness for Adaptive Behavior
The podcast discusses how organisms can use randomness to improve their adaptive behavior. It explains that while most actions are guided by habits and learned behavior, there are situations where randomness can serve as a resource. For example, randomness can help break a deadlock when choices are equally viable or when the current options are not turning out well. The podcast mentions the role of stochasticity in the brain and how it can lead to creative thinking, allowing individuals to explore alternative options and come up with novel solutions.
The Role of Constraints in Free Will
The podcast emphasizes the role of constraints in free will. It argues against an absolute view of free will that dismisses prior causes and highlights how constraints are integral to selfhood and the continuity of an individual's identity through time. It suggests that constraints are necessary for meaningful choices and decision-making, as without constraints, the concept of free will loses its relevance and purpose. The podcast explains that the self is a dynamic and ongoing process influenced by genetics, experiences, goals, and values.
Subjective Awareness and Free Will
The podcast explores the relationship between subjective awareness and free will. It challenges the notion of a unitary self located within the brain, emphasizing instead that the self is composed of perceptions, memories, attitudes, and plans that extend through time. It suggests that our subjective awareness is a dynamic avatar of our ongoing self, allowing us to make decisions and exercise free will based on our past experiences and future aspirations.
The Emergence of Consciousness and Free Will
The podcast delves into the concepts of consciousness and free will. The speaker discusses the self as a continuous entity that extends through time and explores how this self informs and influences our behavior. The distinction between conscious cognitive control and automatic habitual behavior is highlighted. The importance of metacognition and introspection in the control and regulation of behavior is examined. The speaker also considers the value and function of consciousness as a control system, its ability to provide meaningful information, and its role in coordination and communication among individuals. The debate around the emergence of consciousness and the potential causal efficacy of phenomenal aspects is discussed.
Hierarchy and Levels of Intelligence
The podcast explores the hierarchy of intelligence in natural systems and its potential application in artificial intelligence. The speaker emphasizes the need for abstraction, generalization, and goal-directed action to achieve artificial general intelligence. The concept of embodied agents that can act on the world and learn as individuals is discussed. The role of normativity and groundedness in guiding behavior and decision-making is considered. The speaker also highlights the relationship between intelligence, agency, and autonomy, and how these factors contribute to the development of artificial general intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence and the Model of the World
The podcast raises questions about the requirements for artificial intelligence (AI) to possess free will. The speaker suggests that the embodiment of an AI system may be crucial in grounding its behavior and decision-making. The idea of AI embodying a model of the world, similar to genetic models in organisms, is proposed. The speaker argues that a generative model of the organism, including a model of the environment, could be essential in enabling AI to simulate, predict, and adapt to different scenarios. The exploration of how evolution shapes this generative model and its potential application in individual AI systems is presented as an intriguing avenue for future investigation.
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?
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