Free Agents

"Scientists are learning more and more details of how patterns of brain activity control behaviour; how animals - including humans - make decisions, how neural circuits accumulate evidence, weigh alternatives, and instigate actions. But as that decision-making machinery is being revealed, it seems harder to escape the conclusion that we really are just machines. Indeed, according to Mitchell it is fashionable among many scientists to declare that we do not in fact have free will - that there is no way that we could. In this book, Mitchell argues against this notion, instead contending that we really are agents: we make decisions, we choose, we act - we are causal forces in the universe. But Michell's goal here is not merely to lob another bomb into the free will debate; it is to show how, over billiions of years, life actually evolved the power to choose. Mitchell traces how agency evolved from the origin of life and the invention of nervous systems to the elaboration of decision-making and the eventual emergence of the kind of conscious cognitive control in humans that we call "free will." As Mitchell shows, over billions of years life evolved the power to choose, and this view is very much compatible with the laws of physics and new scientific discoveries. What emerges from this book is a new framework for understanding agency. This has important implications for how we think of who we are as humans, how we understand our decision-making processes, how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, and how we think about collective agency, particularly in light of global scale crises. More fundamentally, we see how the story of agency is the story of life itself"--