Episode Overview

In this episode of the Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast, hosted by Mark Klobus for the New Books Network, Mark interviews Kevin J. Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin. Mitchell discusses his latest book, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" (Princeton UP, 2023). The conversation explores the perennial philosophical question of free will through the lens of biology and evolution, aiming to reframe agency and meaning as natural properties of living organisms rather than mysterious or mystical phenomena.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation Behind the Book

• Free Will: A Scientific Approach
  • Mitchell's work in genetics and neuroscience naturally led him to ponder age-old questions about nature versus nurture and free will (00:33).
  • Quote:

    "I wanted to do was try and figure out, is there a way to think about free will that is still naturalistic and scientific? ...a framework in which we could see how you can have free will and agency as biological capacities that aren't mystical or mysterious."
    — Kevin J. Mitchell (03:40)

  • The book responds both to scientific trends dismissing free will as illusion and to philosophical concerns about determinism.

2. Reframing Free Will

• Avoiding Rigid Definitions
  • Mitchell avoids definitions that frame free will as requiring total absence of causation or "ghost in the machine" dualism, which he finds incoherent (05:08).
  • Focuses instead on the lived phenomenology of making choices for reasons, not at random:

    "We feel like we make decisions. So we go around all day long, we're making choices. We're not doing it at random. We're doing it for reasons."
    — Kevin J. Mitchell (06:04)

  • Raises the puzzle: How can mental states have causal power in a purely physical world?

3. Evolutionary Origins of Agency

• From Simple Life to Complex Agency
  • Starts with single-celled organisms:
    • These are not blank slates, but integrate information, respond to meaning, and act with purpose to persist (09:26).
    • Even basic life displays agency—moving toward sugars, away from danger, determined by internal organizational patterns.
  • Meaning, Purpose, and Value as Naturalized Concepts
    • These terms, often seen as unscientific, are reframed as central to biological self-organization.
    • Quote:

      "It's a bit like a tornado, right? The pattern is there even though the individual bits are flying in and out of it... The living thing in that sense, first of all, it's very dynamic."
      — Kevin J. Mitchell (10:04)

• Transition to Multicellularity and Nervous Systems
  • As multicellular life evolved, coordinating parts required nervous systems to process information, attribute value, and enable adaptive behavior (14:00).

4. Against Simple Mechanistic Determinism

• Beyond Reflexes: Informational Causality
  • Rather than seeing neural circuits as mere electrical mechanisms, Mitchell sees them as systems of meaning where information, not just mechanism, matters (16:04).
  • Quote:

    "It's a system of meaning. It's not a system of just mechanism in that Newtonian kind of sense."
    — Kevin J. Mitchell (15:36)

• Sophistication through Nervous Systems
  • Higher-order features (vision, learning, memory) enable organisms not just to react, but to simulate, predict, and choose actions based on internal models and long-term goals (16:22–20:02).
  • Builds a continuum from basic agency in bacteria to human-level planning and introspection.

5. The Role of Meaning in Causation

• Causal Power of Representational States
  • Counters the claim that only physical details of neural firing matter:

    "What matters is what the patterns mean... The neural patterns only have causal power in the system by meaning A or B or C."
    — Kevin J. Mitchell (21:38)

  • Meaning—structured, abstract representations—determines how the organism acts.

6. What Free Will Really Is

• Free Will as Sustained, Integrated Agency
  • Argues for defining free will not as isolated binary moments but as ongoing, holistic control exercised by the organism as a whole (24:05).
  • Highlights the uniquely human capacity for metacognition, introspection, and articulating reasons as an extra level of agency (26:07).
  • Quote:

    "It's being potentially at least aware of your reasons, being able to rethink them, to change them for other reasons... That meets the fairly standard, you know, description of the phenomenon that we set out to explain."
    — Kevin J. Mitchell (26:34)

7. Implications for Law, Identity, and Artificial Intelligence

• Legal and Social Ramifications
  • Supports the sophistication of current legal concepts that treat free will and responsibility as capacities that vary across contexts (28:15).
  • Greater biological understanding may inform, but not radically change, approaches to responsibility.
• Agency Distinguishes Life
  • Insists biology is not just "complicated physics"—organisms do things for reasons, acting as causes themselves.
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Current AI lacks true agency; Mitchell suggests that achieving artificial general intelligence would require building systems with their own internal locus of concern and embodied capacity for causal intervention (29:53).
  • Raises ethical questions about creating such beings, leaving open whether we should.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Agency as Evolution's Achievement:

  "Organisms are doing things for reasons that physics just doesn't encompass. I think that's important and... distinguishes living things from non-living things: living things do things. They're not just acted upon, they can act as causes in the world."
  — Kevin J. Mitchell (29:32)

• On the Limits of Artificial Intelligence:

  "To get to artificial general intelligence, I think we may have to build an agent... to have some reason to care, to be what philosophers call a locus of concern, and to be me. And we may have to embody it in some way in order to do that."
  — Kevin J. Mitchell (29:53)

• On Legal Implications:

  "Our systems, in the legal system for example, of thinking about responsibility, they're really framed around the fact that free will is a capacity and that it varies, it varies between people."
  — Kevin J. Mitchell (28:19)

• Host's Reflection:

  "You tackle so much as it is in the book."
  — Mark Klobus (31:06)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:33 — Mitchell introduces his background and how his interests led to the book.
• 01:49 — Motivation: Countering the dismissal of free will as an illusion.
• 05:08 — Framing the debate: The problem with rigid definitions.
• 09:26 — Agency in the simplest life forms: Purpose, value, and meaning as natural phenomena.
• 14:00 — Evolution of multicellular organisms and the nervous system.
• 16:22 — Higher order features: Perception and learning.
• 20:31 — The centrality of meaning: Information over mechanism.
• 24:05 — Choice as an activity; free will as sustained behavior and metacognition.
• 28:15 — Implications for law, biological science, and AI.
• 29:53 — Can AI ever be a true agent?
• 31:15 — Mitchell’s next research direction: How instincts and form are encoded in genomes.

Closing Thoughts

Mitchell’s holistic, evolution-based account argues that free will and agency are not illusions or supernatural, but central, emergent features of biology grounded in the way organisms—including humans—integrate information, maintain themselves, and pursue goals over time. The implications resonate across philosophy, science, law, and artificial intelligence, offering a nuanced, optimistic view of human autonomy and responsibility—one rooted firmly in our evolutionary origins.