Free Agents: How evolution gave us free will

Posted on: 12 October 2023

In Free Agents Professor Mitchell, a popular science blogger who has engaged many curious minds via his Wiring The Brain blog, takes readers across billions of years of evolution to tell the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice emerged from lifeless matter.

Making an evolutionary case for the existence of free will, Prof. Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Free Agents has important implications for how we understand individual decision making, how it can be influenced or infringed, and how we talk about collective agency in the face of local and global crises. The book delivers the untold evolutionary history of choice and control, and why this matters for our future, especially our relationship with artificial intelligence.

In understanding how living things have come to acquire the ability to choose and to act as causes in the world, Prof. Mitchell explores how agency evolved from the origin of life itself. The emergence of nervous systems granted sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, simulate, and decide. From this emerged the kind of conscious cognitive control in humans that we refer to as “free will”.

Throughout Free Agents, Prof. Mitchell convincingly counters arguments from philosophy, physics, and his own field of neuroscience that free will is an illusion. For example, widely reported findings from human neuroscience claim that we never really make decisions at all and that our brains just do the deciding for us; Mitchell unpacks several experiments showing this to be a drastic over-interpretation.

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