DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
A look at our mind and free will
Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
Kevin Mitchell, 2023
Kevin Mitchell is a professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College, Dublin. His book is an articulate defense of the view that human beings are agents with some degree of freedom of choice, based on an in-depth understanding of neuroscience. Mitchell has provided a cogent and comprehensive argument against the perspective advanced by Robert Sapolsky in Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.
The early chapters of Mitchell's book discuss the biological evolution of mind, beginning with single celled bacteria and eventually in the central nervous systems of animals. He argues that homeostatic processes at the boundary of nerve cells do not involve "a simple conveyance of transfer of physical forces ... Even for receptors that signal by opening a channel for ions, it is not a transfer of energy or matter that is doing the causal work but a change in the distribution of charge. It is relative information that is being transmitted."
Furthermore, "it is not enough for a signal to be physically correlated with -- to signify -- something outside a cell. The meaning of the signal does not inhere in that signification alone but in the act of interpretation." Mitchell argues that human agency begins in the requirement that physical signals from the environment be given a meaning with respect to some goal or purpose, e.g., the identification of threat. Stimulus and response is one approach to threats and opportunities, but so is mental simulation of various scenarios, as well as in humans (and some other animals) the ability to create mental representations of the physical environment. Mitchell does not deny the obvious, i.e. that the brains of humans depend on a host of neural mechanisms; rather his argument is that these mechanisms support agency rather than undermine the reality of choices in many situations.
In Chapter 8, "Harnessing Indeterminacy," Mitchell describes a degree of physical indeterminacy in central nervous systems:
1. Indeterminacy manifests as "noise in neural populations," i.e., random fluctuations in the transmission of signals made possible by ion channels in the brain. Mitchell explains that ion channels sometimes fail to open even when neurotransmitters are released at synaptic terminals and/or when a neurotransmitter is detected by the neurons that receive it. He writes: "at these small scales, these events are subject to quantum indeterminacy." Mitchell asserts that "Under more natural conditions, recording from neurons in an intact animal typically reveals considerable variability from trial to trial ... some researchers argue that it (variability in electrical signaling in response to the same stimulus) is caused by inherent random fluctuations in ion channels and synaptic machinery. Others argue that the variability is not noise at all but rather reflects contextual signals from all the other neurons that the neuron is attached to ..."
2. Mitchell argues that the variability of neural responses among animals or in the same animal serves to enable flexibility: "The function is to help an organism adapt to ever changing circumstances in its environment." The brain, he maintains, is not organized like a digital computer designed to produce a correct answer to queries. He maintains: "Natural selection has thus calibrated the level of noise in the system to to help simple organisms adapt flexibly to a changeable environment. The same is true in multi-cellular organisms, where the noise in the nervous systems loosens stimulus -response mappings and enables behavioral flexibility. "
3. Mitchell asserts: " ... the apparent unreliability of neural transmission ... is a feature in the system, not a bug." In addition, " .. the reality of noisy processes in the nervous systems .. highlight a surprising but very important fact: organisms can sometimes choose to do something random."
Mitchell discusses the two stage model of free will proposed by the philosopher and psychologist, William James in 1884. "This model incorporates a degree of indeterminism in our cognition while protecting the causal role of the agent in actually deciding what to do." As James put it, "Our thoughts come to us freely. Our actions go from us willfully." But what about situations in which distressed people have obsessive painful thoughts they are unable to control and are unable to inhibit their self hurtful behavior? The insistence that people are agents with a degree of freedom to make real choices needs to be balanced by a recognition that some mental conditions virtually eliminate agency, and that some habitual ways of responding to challenges limit the power to control one's life. Mitchell's area of expertise is neuroscience, not psychology.
One of the most interesting and difficult to summarize parts of Free Agents is the discussion of how nervous systems evolved to translate physical processes in the brain and body into semantic meaning "decoupled from an obligatory physical response and the value of its outcomes." This is a highly technical discussion of the mapping functions of various parts of the brain with a concrete implication: "the important point to remember is that cognitive elements like beliefs, desires and intentions can be encoded in patterns of neural activity that mean something for the organism, and it is those meanings that inform and guide our choices." In other words, brains evolved to create agents that have the power to act for reasons best described by semantic categories, rather than by neural mechanisms.
Deciding on strategy vs. deciding motives
Much of Mitchell's argument concerns the evolutionary value of flexibility in achieving an organism's goals, which are determined to a great extent by genetics. Perhaps free agents can choose the strategies useful to achieving their goals, but do they have any freedom of choice re their motivations? Mitchell argues that the evolution of mind has provided "a suite of mechanisms" that give us the power to "identify and think about our own beliefs and drives and motivations, examine our own character and consciously adopt new goals or set new policies that guide our future behavior." These powers include introspection, imagination and metacognition ( " thinking about thinking"). "We have, in short, the capacity of self awareness," Mitchell asserts. He quotes the Taoist sage, Lao Tzu: "Watch your actions, they become habit. Watch your habits, they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.' Mitchell states: "Each of us has been very actively involved in the process of shaping the person we've become."
There is an important perspective Mitchell has missed in his lengthy discussion of the causal effects of heritable traits and upbringing on personality development, a perspective I have discussed in several articles and book reviews: character is not set in stone and is subject to polarities that create the potential for dramatic change in two main circumstances, a) the immediate social environment is dramatically altered, which creates the possibility for a dramatic change in social identity or b) a person becomes disgusted with their life, including their habitual ways of coping and is converted, either gradually or suddenly, to a new way of being in the world. Thee are many types of conversions, not just religious ones. The conflicted divided self makes possible a range of possibilities. The polarized self can be reshaped in part by conscious agency in touch with strong feelings that demand a radical change. Jennifer Egan's novel, The Candy House. is a brilliant exploration of this dynamic in multiple characters.
-- Dee Wilson