BI 175 Kevin Mitchell: Free Agents

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Oct 3, 2023

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.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

Exploring Free Will and Behavioral Genetics

04:18 • 11min

Writing for the Educated Public

15:14 • 2min

Exploring the Challenges of Free Will and Choice

17:37 • 15min

The Importance of Indeterminacy in Free Will

32:58 • 21min

Constraints and Free Will

53:54 • 18min

The Role of Interneurons in the Development of Agency and Abstract Thinking

01:11:33 • 7min

The Emergence of Free Will in Humans

01:18:43 • 9min

Levels and Processes of the Mind

01:28:07 • 3min

Influences on Behavior, Personality Traits, and Character Emergence

01:31:29 • 4min

Constraints and Influences on Human Behavior

01:35:08 • 8min

Artificial Intelligence as an Entity and Embodiment of a Model of the World

01:42:44 • 3min

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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.

Kevin's website.
Twitter: @WiringtheBrain
Book: Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

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?