| 0:37 | Intro. [Recording date: November 12, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is November 12th, 2025, and my guest is neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell. His latest book is Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Kevin, welcome to EconTalk. Kevin Mitchell: Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. |
| 0:51 | Russ Roberts: This is a deep, subtle, nuanced, fresh look at a very old question: the question of free will versus determinism. But it's much more than that: it's an overview of evolution. It's an overview of how evolution created increasingly complex life forms here on earth. And, most interesting to me, it's a very nuanced framework for thinking about what it means to be a human being. Related episodes on the other side of the free-will/determinism debate include my discussion with Robert Sapolsky on his book, Determined, and the recent episode with Gaurav Suri on his book with James McClelland, The Emergent Mind. Kevin, you start with a beautiful metaphor of the video game that your son is playing and the difference between your son as a player and the bartender, who is what's called an NPC--a Non-Player Character--who your son as a player encounters in the game. Explain why that metaphor is relevant for this conversation. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. It kind of struck me. I mean, it was a true story: I was literally watching him play this video game. And it struck me that the game kind of encapsulated this concern that people have had--over millennia, really--that there was the contrast between him as the player, where he seemed to be acting really for his interests--he had goals in the game; he was pursuing those goals; he was making decisions given the scenario that the game presented to him, and so on--and then these other people that he would encounter, these non-player characters. Like, the bartender, where you go and you ask them something. And then the bartender--which is just pieces of code, really--responds somehow. But, it seems like they're also characters, they're also entities, these non-player characters. The concern is that what you--you have this sort of intuition that there's a difference, that you say, 'Well, I'm doing things because I want to for my own reasons, and they are just playing out their programming.' And then the concern is, like, 'Well, okay, but what if I'm just playing out my programming? What if I'm just acting out what the genetic code says I should do, generally speaking, or what my experiences have wired into my brain at any moment so that I have an illusion of choice, but maybe I'm fooling myself? Maybe I'm a non-player character, just an automaton.' And that's the existential freakout moment that you can have when you start thinking about these issues too deeply. Russ Roberts: It comes down--one way to capture that you talk about in the book is the question of agency. Russ Roberts: The bartender has no agency. The bartender is programmed to behave in certain ways when encountering certain things. Unless the bartender goes rogue--which does not really happen in our current world. Russ Roberts: Or the makers of the game could introduce a random element into the bartender's behavior, but even that is pre-programmed. So, the bartender clearly has no agency. Russ Roberts: The worry is, is that: Well, your son doesn't either. He's supposed to do his homework, but he's gotten into this terrible habit--we'll talk about habits a little bit--but he's gotten into this terrible habit of playing video games. So he thinks he's choosing to play the video game when in fact he's just a victim of his own--as you say--his own code. We're all just code. Whether it's DNA [Deoxyribonucleic acid] [Deoxyribonucleic Acid] or our past or our nurture or nature or life experiences, and so on. So, to make this even more vivid, I want you to make the reductionist case for determinism. The hard version. The strong version. And I think--I have a horse in this race. I want to confess, listeners know, I would like there to be free will. I am troubled by the determinist case. I find it difficult, but I wish it weren't so. And so I found your book very comforting in that sense. Kevin Mitchell: Okay. Good. Russ Roberts: But, in my reading, you do a very fair job in steelmanning, as the expression goes--in giving a fair version of the determinist case. You make it a number of times in the book, and I think each time you do it well. So, make that case, the case that there's no free will. Kevin Mitchell: Right. The strange thing about this is that it seems like we go about making decisions all the time. That seems to be the kind of bedrock of our experience. And yet, there's these lingering doubts that people have had for thousands of years about how this could possibly be the case. And, if it was trivial to rebut them, then there wouldn't have been a need to write the book, right? So they have some purchase. I mean, these are strong intuitions once you start thinking about them. And the first level is the level we already talked about: the idea that, 'Yeah, it seems like we're freely in control of our actions,' but actually we're being driven by our habits. We're being driven by the psychological programming that's in our minds based on our past experiences. And I think someone like your previous guest, Robert Sapolsky, would argue for that-- Russ Roberts: Yeah-- Kevin Mitchell: He would say that all of the experiences that you've had to date are shaping your mind and your brain in such a way that when you encounter some new scenario, you develop the intent to do something. And you do that. You do what you want to do. But the emergence of the intent is not up to you. You don't have a hand in that. Your brain is just suggesting it to you. Russ Roberts: You feel it, but that's an illusion--is the claim. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. The argument is that that's an illusion. Exactly. That you're not really free when--the intent just pops into your mind, and then you carry it out. Right? That would be the argument. Now, I'm going to jump ahead and say: I just don't buy that argument. There's lots of evidence that the intent doesn't just pop into your mind. That, in fact, you are actively involved in making the decision about what to do. The intent is the end point of that product--sorry, of that process--that you are actively engaged in. It doesn't just appear, most of the time. In some cases it's true, but not--one of the key things here is you shouldn't extrapolate from what happens in one kind of scenario to every kind of scenario. And I think that's a mistake that people have made across this literature, generally. Okay, but we've got this sort of psychological intuition that maybe we are really non-player characters. We're just driven by all of our past experience to not really have a choice in the moment, just at a psychological, cognitive kind of level. But, you can go below that. Right? Neuroscientists are very much materialists in that they're interested in how the machine works. Right? And as neuroscientists, we've been incredibly successful in getting in there and studying what's going on, not just in people's brains, but in animals as they are making decisions. With things like neuroimaging technologies, where we can scan someone's brain while they're making decisions, we can kind of see the cogs turning. We can say, 'Well, look, I see something happening in your brain when you're making a decision, and it's in this circuit, or this circuit. If you make this decision, I'm likely to see more activity in your amygdala, or your prefrontal cortex, or wherever the case might be.' And that, you know, gives the impression that actually your brain is making the decision--not you. That's a weird framing. Right? Because it kind of suggests: on the one hand, we have this very materialist, reductive sort of view of the mechanism. And then on the other hand, you've got you. Well, what's you? Some free-floating ghost in the machine? It's a strange framing. And, I think there's two ways to look at this neuroscientific evidence. One is to say: Clearly, your brain is making the decision, not you. And the other is to say you are making the decision using your brain. Like, what else would you use? Obviously, there's going to be activity in your brain while you're making a decision. But still, there's other experiments in animals where it's not just observing what's happening: it's driving activity. We can go in and we can activate specific parts of an animal's brain, and we can make it go to sleep. We can make it move forwards or backwards, or roll around. We can make it hunt. We can make it do reproductive behaviors. All sorts of things can be kind of remote-controlled in mice and rats, and so on. We can even change the way that they think. We can change their decision-making so that they are more risk averse, or they're more impulsive, or something like that. And once you can do that--when you can control the machinery of decision making--it really just focuses the mind on the mechanistic aspect, and it leads to the kind of intuition that the whole organism as an agent is actually not doing anything. It's a place where stuff is happening, but it's really being driven around by what's happening within its parts. And that's obviously a concern. |
| 10:54 | Russ Roberts: I just want to mention: We had Patrick House and Itzhak Fried on for an episode where they talk about--they were doing brain surgery. Itzhak Fried was the surgeon. Patrick's a neuroscientist. But, Itzhak Fried's a surgeon, and he's trying to reduce seizures. And he's got this young woman's head, or top of her head, off and he's in her brain. He's poking around to make sure that when he takes something out, he doesn't hit something, quote, "important." All seems pretty important, but he's running a sensor around. One of the things he does, he pokes in at one point and she starts giggling. He says, 'What's so funny?' Of course, there's no answer to that. The right answer is she's giggling because the humor part of her brain has been stimulated electrically by a surgeon. So she makes something up. She says something like, 'Horses are funny,' because there's a horse somewhere in the--I can't remember the exact detail. But, that's disturbing, because we think we laugh because things are amusing, but you could argue that we only laugh because our neurons fire in the laughter region, and we exhibit a chuckling or giggling. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. Yeah. A lot has been made of these kinds of cases where, especially in people with neurological damage to some part of the brain, they can do things for reasons that they're not aware of. And then, when you ask them, they often make up a story. It's called confabulating. They make up a story. They're trying to interpret their own behavior because they don't have access consciously to some processes that they normally do, and then they make up a story post hoc. So, this is an example where people have, I think, overextrapolated from that kind of data. They say, 'Okay, well, here in these patients with neurological conditions, or under conditions where it's a particular experimental setup that uses some psychological thing, it gives you subliminal processing that you're not aware of, a sneaky psychologist design.' You can also get people to confabulate even when they don't have any neurological damage. Russ Roberts: The claim is that it's all confabulation-- Kevin Mitchell: That's true[?]-- Russ Roberts: at the extreme. That's the--I want to be fair to-- Kevin Mitchell: That's the extrapolation-- Russ Roberts: I want to be fair to Gaurav Suri, but to some extent, the argument in The Emergent Mind is that your neurons are firing and you're responding. You're moving your arm, you're running around, you're spending your time imagining something in the future, whatever it is. And, you convince yourself you're doing that because you had a reason, but it's all part of the hardware running in the background. And, that's one extreme. The other extreme, which I find even more interesting, is the Big Bang--it's what William James calls the iron block--that everything from the beginning of time was inevitable. Once the Big Bang happened, it was inevitable that in 2025, Kevin Mitchell would be a guest on EconTalk-- Kevin Mitchell: Exactly-- Russ Roberts: and we'd be having this conversation. Because, it's all physics. It's all atoms and molecules. What's wrong with that argument? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. So, it's a very seductive argument, and it carries a lot of force. The idea is we started at the psychological level. We said, 'You're psychologically determined to act in certain ways.' And then we went down to the neuroscience level and said--the implication is, 'Look, all that psychological talk is kind of epiphenomenal. It's not really causal. The fact that you believe something or desire something is not actually the cause of your behavior. It's these neurons firing in the machine.' So, it reduces behavior to the output of an electrical engineering system, almost: it's at the neural level. But, why stop? Why stop at that level? You can keep going down, because you can say, 'Well, look, neurons are made of molecules and atoms, and they're going to obey the laws of physics, so everything that happens within you is actually dictated by the laws of physics.' There, you get to the deepest level of determinism, exactly the concern that you just articulated, which is that if those laws are fully deterministic, then everything that happened from the Big Bang till now was already predetermined. Russ Roberts: It's all cooked in. Kevin Mitchell: It's cooked in. So, let me just explain what that means for the laws to be deterministic. What it means is that if you have the state of the universe at a given time point, and it's fully defined--fully, precisely defined at some time point--then you just apply those numbers to the laws of whether it's--it could be Newton's laws, it could be the Schrodinger equation when it comes to quantum fields and things like that, whatever the level at which you're doing the calculation. And then there's just an outcome that's inevitable as you go along. That's the argument. And, we interpret that idea that the laws are deterministic, really, from Newton's laws of classical mechanics because what he showed, say, for the orbits of the planets, is that when you can really, really predict where there are going to be thousands of years in advance, very, very accurately, and there doesn't seem to be any chancy element there. There's no bit of randomness there in those equations. Russ Roberts: And if they get it wrong--if you get it wrong because there's a comet that you didn't anticipate, that's just you didn't have the full state of data about the system. Russ Roberts: In other words, there's the equivalent of the idea of an omniscient God who would know everything, then could--obviously, because the universe is subject to the laws of physics--that God would know everything that would happen from the beginning of time to the end of time, whatever that means. But, at any point in time, as you say, it's just mechanics. Kevin Mitchell: Yes. So, there's this fictional being that was proposed by a French mathematician whose name was Laplace, which came to be called Laplace's Demon. The demon in this case was this omniscient being. And, the interesting thing for this being was not just that they could predict everything that was going to happen, but that actually time would be meaningless for them. All of time would just be laid out as a whole thing all at once because any moment going forwards, or backwards, would entail every other moment in it. Right? So, that's the argument. And in fact, if you look at Einstein's theory of relativity, he has this idea of a block universe where it's very much the same ideas: that everything is sort of fixed, and there's no--there's actually no definition of the present moment within that. Nothing distinguishes the present from the past and the future. Which is interesting given that that's such an obviously important part of our experience, that these major physical theories don't know what to say about it. That's an interesting thing, a wrinkle that gets overlooked, I think. Russ Roberts: My philosopher friend here at Shalem College tells me--one of my philosopher friends tells me that scientists aren't good at philosophy. He thinks their view of time is just wrong. And that's another episode. But, that's the implication of the iron block is that there's no before, during, or after. That's just the way we experience it. It's all pre-done. Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. Exactly. Russ Roberts: There's no, 'I wonder what will happen tomorrow.' No you don't. Russ Roberts: I mean, you might. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. And so, the implication is, if--first of all, the implication is the future is fixed. There are no possibilities. Possibilities just don't exist. That's not a thing that exists in a deterministic universe. And so the idea that we might be exercising choice doesn't even arise. It's just not relevant-- Russ Roberts: It's an illusion-- Kevin Mitchell: or applicable, yeah, under those circumstances. And so, the odd thing about this from my point of view, looking at the debate that has raged for millennia, is that it's always free will versus determinism. And, determinism, many people just take it that physics says that that's the case: physics is deterministic, that that's a result of physics. And it's absolutely not. It's just: physics doesn't say at all that the world is like that. So it's really weird that the entire debate in free will--when you're talking about free will, people just assume that it's free will versus determinism. In fact, you can make a very good argument from physics that there's inherent indeterminacy in the way that things evolve in physical systems. That's true at the quantum level, which is, I think, well known. But it's also true at the classical level, which is less well-known. And, the implication of that, then, is, Well, now we've got a different challenge, if we're talking about free will. In a deterministic universe, you have to ask where could the freedom come from? There's no freedom in that universe. Everything's just inevitable. But, in an indeterministic universe where many things could happen, where there's some probabilistic nature to what goes on based purely on the laws of physics, well, then you have to ask for an organism, where does the control come from? Right? How can an organism have some control over what goes on? Because, it feels like either the universe is deterministic--in which case you have no choice--or at the low levels there's some indeterminacy. But, if the way that the indeterminacy plays out just in terms of physical interactions, if you can't affect that and it ultimately manifests in your behavior, then you also have no choice. So it feels like we're on the horns of a dilemma. |
| 20:58 | Russ Roberts: I challenged Robert Sapolsky, or at least mentioned this role of quantum indeterminacy. And he writes about it in his book. He rejects it--for those reasons. He's saying, 'Yes, there is indeterminacy in the universe, but since you can't control it, only acts on you. You don't act on it.' So, I think that was his argument; but it's certainly a good argument. Kevin Mitchell: It is a good argument, but it misses one vital point. And the vital point is this--and this is really actually kind of the core, I guess, if you want to say metaphysical argument in my own approach. The argument is that the fact that the future is open, that when you have some indeterminacy at the low levels--and that comes from not just from quantum stuff; there's other arguments for why there must be some indefiniteness to the future if the future is really open--if that's true, then what it means is many things could happen. It's just not the case that the current state of the universe says only one thing could happen. We start at time t, the current state; then, at time t+1, it's actually a bit indefinite. Multiple things could happen. And then the question is, what other kinds of factors could constrain what happens? Right? And there you get the possibility that actually the way that a system is organized could do some work to constrain the trajectories that are possible--the possibility space that emerges. And, so this is actually utterly commonplace, even though people seem to think it poses this huge metaphysical problem. Like, the computer I'm using right now is constraining the paths and trajectories of electrons within it by virtue of the hardware being organized a certain way, and by virtue of the software that is running. And it does that without violating the laws of physics. It's not going down, pushing individual quantum events around. It's actually not meddling or micromanaging at that level. There's still all this noisy improbability happening down there--sorry--indeterminacy happening down there. What it's doing is constraining the possibility space of how things could go at a macroscopic level. It doesn't matter--my computer running this program, it's not affected by individual electrons zigging or zagging. It's affected by populations of electrons, and robust, emergent statistical behavior in the circuits that are doing things. So, you can get macroscopic organization that controls things at a macroscopic level without, like I said, violating anything. There's no new laws of physics. There's no overriding the core theory of quantum mechanics or anything like that. It's just that that level, the core theory of quantum mechanics, is just not causally complete because it's inherently got probabilistic elements. It opens some causal slack for something else to be involved. Russ Roberts: But, I really like this argument you make--and I don't fully appreciate it; it's very subtle--about how the system itself is affecting the question of, say, agency. |
| 24:15 | Russ Roberts: So, I want to talk for a minute about evolution, which is the way you frame--again, I'll say it this way--the way you frame the human experience. So, in one view--in the determinist view--my choices, and freedom, and agency is an illusion, and I'm fooling myself, and that's just built into the hardware and software of the human body and brain. You have a different view or a different way of thinking about it. And, it takes you 300 pages to really lay it out. So, I don't want you to try to do this in 144 characters, but try to give us the flavor of why a different perspective on what we're doing, and where we came from, and how the processes of the human biology are relevant to this question. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. No, that's great. So, I mean, my approach in the book is--yeah, like you say, to take an evolutionary approach, to try and understand not just how humans can control their behavior, but how any organism can be said to be doing anything. I mean, so before life emerged, there weren't any doings in the universe. There were just happenings. Things were happening. And then, at some point, these entities emerged that seemed to be able to do things. Right? They're causal agents unto themselves. And, that's a really deep question. And, it felt to me like if we didn't get a handle on it at that level, we'd never understand humans, this most complicated sort of instantiation of these powers as we see them. So, what I wanted to do was build up some of the concepts gradually and naturalize them so that it didn't feel mystical if, at the end, I was talking about us doing things for a reason, things having meaning for us, acting on purpose, things having value. We can get a handle on those ideas in very simple organisms, even at the origin of life, and get a sense of what does it mean? Like, we want to understand what it means to be a human being. At the core of that, the question is, what does it mean to be a living being? What is life really about? And, for me, the core element of life, which is actually, I think, often overlooked in biology, is agency. It's the fact that living things do things. They act in the world. So, all of this hinges on this idea of macroscopic organization. And, the one extra element that you need to add to this to understand it is the idea of selection. So, you could have--in a complex system many things could happen. And, when that's true, then you could end up going one way or the other. Right? Now the question is, can you arrive at an organization that is better at persisting as a pattern than another organization? And, just randomly, by chance, somewhere in there, you'll get some patterns of activity that are sort of self-reinforcing. So, in our world, on our planet, that emerged as sets of chemical reactions that reinforce each other. So, you get these sets of reactions where the product of one reaction is the substrate for the next, and you get these sort of interlocking cycles that all reinforce each other. And, it's thought that these probably started out as what we call geochemistry. So, it was chemistry in probably, like, deep sea vents that started to produce organic molecules with lots of hydrocarbons, basically, doing these sorts of complex interlocking chemical reactions that ultimately became a pattern that is stabilizing itself as an entire regime. Whereas, patterns that just happened to arise that were unstable, well, we just don't see them. It's a tautological kind of dynamic where things that are good at persisting tend to persist. They are then the substrate for further evolution, and so on. And, eventually this geochemistry became biochemistry, and we had free-living organisms that are--they're contained within a little membrane, a little bubble, or a cell wall that separates the inside from the outside. And then, they're also, in a sense, trying to persist. They're doing work. They're doing thermodynamic work to keep that pattern, that dynamic pattern, going, right? Which is--again, that's a completely new thing. There was nothing like that in the world before that. |
| 29:04 | Russ Roberts: So, let's take an example that would--and I'm not sure what you're going to say in response to this--but, a flower, a plant, will turn toward the sun. Russ Roberts: I turn toward the buffet, or the football game, whatever, or your book. I have my own actions. The flower is--we might think about a rock that gets strewn from a volcano is a happening. It has no agency. It has no control. It is subject to the laws of physics. And, if we had all the data, we can tell you where the rock is going to land, if we know the force at which it's expelled from the volcano, what angle. There's some chaotic stuff about when it bounces around, but let's put that to the side. Russ Roberts: The flower acts as if it has agency. We don't think it--I mean, some people do think it has consciousness. Kevin Mitchell: [?]We can argue. Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's been argued, but I don't. So, I'm going to say it looks--that's an illusion. If the flower can't talk, but if I could turn to the flower and say, 'Why did you bend over that direction?' You'd say, 'Well, I like the sun. I think it's good for me. And, I've learned that when I do that, I do better.' It doesn't talk. It can't explain itself, but it looks like, and I didn't know better, it looks as if it has agency and autonomy. When I turn to the football game, when, say, my wife in the restaurant wants me to be talking to her, and I find myself unconsciously trying to check the score, am I any different from the flower? What's going on there? I mean, what's significant about--my wetwear, the combination of my brain, and body, and DNA, and cells, is much more complicated than the flower in a certain dimension, but am I really any different? Kevin Mitchell: Yes. So, this is the journey that the book tries to trace, is this trajectory from as if agency to real agency. And, when you were talking about real agency, you mentioned the word consciousness there. And, as the idea that there's an extra element here. It's not just that you're acting for reasons. It's that you're aware of what those reasons are. You would be able to articulate them if somebody asked you why you did something. You might be able to interrogate them yourself and ask, 'Is this a good reason for doing something?' And so on. And so, that's the highest level that we know of, of agency, which has this level of metacognition where you're aware of your own mental processes. But, the trajectory evolutionary was a long way to get there. And, it starts out with a much more simple kind of agency, which still is purposive. There's still a purpose to it. They're still acting for reasons, even if the reasons are kind of baked in by evolution. So, even, like, a bacterium that has a tendency to move towards a food source, for example, is acting for a reason relative to its purpose, and its purpose is to persist. And, it's not aware of that. There's no awareness, right? Russ Roberts: Right. It's just driven by the millennia, eons of natural selection-- Kevin Mitchell: Exactly-- Russ Roberts: and random mutations to get to that point. Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. But, the purpose is a very real thing. You can't understand what's going on without recourse to saying that the reason this thing is configured in the way that it is, that that's a good policy to have that favors its persistence. And so, I talked about things being this sort of dynamic stability--a living thing as just being a set of dynamic processes, a pattern that's trying to persist through time. The problem is the world doesn't cooperate. The world is changing. It's this dynamic, hostile environment usually. And, what that means is that living organisms, it pays for them to be reactive or adaptive to, as conditions change. Russ Roberts: Or proactive. Kevin Mitchell: Even better is to be proactive, exactly, to anticipate possible changes in the environment. And so, what organisms have evolved--and this includes the very simplest organisms like bacteria--is a way of gathering information about what's out in the world, and a way of linking that to a policy or a decision about what to do about it. So, our little bacterium has a policy sort of biochemically wired into it that, when it detects food through this receptor that sits on the membrane of the cell, and it gives a little wiggle inside the cell, then the cell changes its direction of motion. The little bacteria, they swim around with kind of, like,an outboard motor. So, what's interesting there is that if you look at that system, you might say, 'Okay, well, clearly the bacterium is literally being pushed around by its parts.' You can see individual proteins inside it changing their biochemical confirmation or activity, and the eventual result is: Food out here, bacteria moves this way. And, that's basically similar to what I was talking about with the neuroscientists, where they say, 'You only did X because this part of your brain was active, and it connects to your muscles in this way, and this was the action that was instituted as a result of that.' However, I think what you can do is actually zoom out a little bit and say, 'Well, wait a minute. Actually, if I give my bacterium a food source like that, it doesn't always move towards the food. It depends what else is around. It's actually integrating lots of things.' I mean, when we do an experiment that's the only thing we have in the experiment is there's some food over here, and there's a bacterium, then we get a pretty reliable result, even though it's executed in a probabilistic fashion. But, if we put other things around, now that's much more naturalistic. Now our bacterium is having to act like a wholistic agent. It's having to say, 'Wait, okay, there's a food source over there, but maybe the pH of the solution is too low over there. That'll kill me.' Or there's other kinds of things. Or maybe their metabolic state is actually fine: they're not low on fuel, so they don't need to go towards food. Maybe they're dividing. Whatever it is. So, when you take a more wholistic view, what you get, rather than this mechanistic, reductive thing being pushed around by its parts, is you get an organism that's encountering the world in a proactive way. It's not sitting there waiting for some stimulus. It's always active, and it's exploring the world. It accommodates to new information, it integrates a bunch of things, and then it kind of makes an all-things-considered judgment that's optimal given multiple goals and multiple parameters that it's trying to satisfy. And, I mean, there's a direct analogy to economy here in terms of bounded rationality, and trying to optimize over multiple conflicting goals and timescales, and so on. Russ Roberts: Sure. And, local maxima, and-- Kevin Mitchell: Absolutely. Absolutely. Russ Roberts: It could be that going forward a few inches seems like a bad idea, but if you just go a foot, it's a fantastic paradise for this bacteria [inaudible 00:36:25]. Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. Yeah. So, living systems have had to evolve control systems that allow them to adapt to changing conditions, and that basically give them the power to act in the world as a wholistic entity, as an agent. And the reason is that the agent is acting for reasons that favor its persistence as a whole thing. It's not like the individual proteins within a bacterium are not trying to persist. The whole pattern is trying to persist. Even if it's only as if, like, once you get strong enough, there's actually no difference from as if and really is. It's--until you get to points where there's now this meta-awareness of goals and reasons, and so on. So, I think we can start with the simplest life forms. We've got purpose; we've got meaning, value; we've got informational kinds of causation that are at play that transcend just physics. When a receptor binds a food molecule like a sugar on the outside of the cell, there isn't any transfer of energy or momentum that's pushing anything around. There's just an informational change. There's a confirmation of the protein inside the cell that is a signal. So, we have a kind of causation that, again, is not at play in any non-living part of the universe. This was something that came along with life. |
| 37:53 | Russ Roberts: Well, the thing that's beautiful about it, the way I would phrase it--take it probably from you--is that it's not mechanistic. It's not determinant. No one could predict it. Even the omniscient demon might have, or God--it's fun that Laplace called it a demon--would have trouble anticipating it because you'd have to look inside the cell. Now, if you had all the information, maybe you could. But, the other thing I want to emphasize here, which I think is the reason the book is so thought-provoking--I want to go back to my football game. So, I'm not going to make it about me because I don't want anyone to draw any conclusions about my marriage, but let's say, Kevin, you're--well, we'll call it Keith. Keith is at a restaurant with his wife, Kathy. And, Keith, in the middle of a conversation where Kathy is sharing something personal, finds himself turning his head and looking at the game. What's interesting about the human experience that your book forces you to think about is that Kathy doesn't say, 'Well, he can't help himself. It's all predetermined.' Kathy says, 'Why aren't you listening to me? Don't you love me? Why are you not giving me your full attention?' So, Kathy, inside her skin, inside her shell of humanness, is going to make working assumptions about Keith's motivation, Keith's agency. And she's going to hold him accountable. And, really what your book--part[?] we'll turn to character in a minute--but what your book reminds us is that if Karen does that enough, Keith might become a better conversationalist. Or he might end up getting divorced because Karen is either frustrated, hurt, would think she could do better somewhere else--going to move away from the rock like the bacterium. And, that's the way we live as human beings. Nobody lives--forget the philosophical questions of free will versus determinism--nobody lives for a second--well, they do occasionally because they want to excuse their behavior--but almost no one accepts in their own life the idea that they can't control themselves. After the fact, they might say that. But, everyone holds as a model that we have choice, we have agency. We shame--as you point out--we shame people who act badly in our view. We honor people who act well, which would make no sense in a deterministic universe. Does the illusion keep going and going? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, it does make no sense. And, I think you're right to say that even the most ardent free-will skeptic, the most avowed free-will skeptic, doesn't live like that. And, the implication--it's not just about whether we make decisions and should be held accountable for them. It's about what it means to be a human being. Because if you think that actually you have no agency and autonomy at all, you are not a human being. You're not a person. I mean, the definition of a person is someone who has enough autonomy to be afforded the dignity of being thought of with personhood. I mean, it just doesn't mean anything to be a self. Russ Roberts: At least after a certain age. At least after a certain age. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely. But, it doesn't mean anything to be a self if you don't have some autonomous kind of control. So, you touched on a really important aspect here, which is the idea that Keith could learn--or could be trained--not to look at the football game during a conversation or a dinner with his wife. Right? So, that is the next sort of stage in the evolutionary process, is: Once we go from unicellular organisms where they have to figure out what's out in the world and what should I do about it, we get this transition in evolution to multicellular organisms; and then they had to reinvent this equipment for figuring what's out in the world and what should I do about it, and the ability to actually move around in the world. So, they invented sensory organs--eyes and ears, and whiskers, and antennae, and so on. And they invented muscles and limbs, and things were moving around. And, they invented a control system to hook those things up to each other, and to adjudicate over complex sets of possibilities. And, that is, of course, the nervous system. And, the amazing thing with the nervous system is, evolutionarily you can wire in some preconfigured control policies that are just good things to do, like an escape response of a startled rabbit or something like that. It's not thinking about anything. That's wired in by evolution. It doesn't require any learning whatsoever-- Russ Roberts: It's a reflex-- Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. Right? And, we have our own reflexes as well that are just good things to do. But, nervous systems are amazing because they can learn. So, what that means is that it enables individual organisms over their lifetime to acquire new information. And, most of the information that they're interested in is based on how things have turned out. They've been in a certain scenario, they've tried some action, and it either turned out well or it didn't. And, if it turned out well, then that's a piece of information that they can use--actually, either way, it's a piece of information that they can use if they're faced with the same scenario again. Or a similar scenario. And, this is where we learn not just about the outcomes of actions, but we also learn about the nature of the world, the kinds of entities that are out in the world. We can categorize them as living or non-living, cats or dogs, human beings, males or females, things you can eat, things that might eat you, whatever it is. You develop these categories where, when you learn something, when you learn one thing about a member of a category, it doesn't just apply to that one thing: it applies to everything else. If you've ever been bitten by a dog, you can be shy of all dogs in the future because they're the type of thing that can bite you. So, we can build up this complex kind of model of the world that's populated with all of these kinds of entities, these categorical relations between them, a sort of[?] network of causal relations; and those causal relations particularly apply to what I can do in the world, and what things in the world can do to me. And then, that's the array of information over which we're operating when we're making a decision and we're trying to say, 'What's the best thing for me to do?' And, you're drawing on all that past experience. And, you know, you mentioned habits, which: habits get a bad rap because there's a sense in which having a habit is just reducing your freedom. And, in one sense, that can be true, but in another sense, it's really good. Right? So, I've got lots of habits that I apply all the time where a habit is basically just like: I know in a certain situation this is a good thing to do. And, I don't need to think about it actively now. I don't need to expend cognitive resources and precious time because I've thought about this loads of times before. I know it's a good thing to do. That's just a super-super-efficient way to manage your control system and make the most out of the learning-from-experience that you've had. And so, when you're faced with a scenario in which that's very, very familiar, there may be a habitual response that you engage in. And then, the question is, okay, for free will, what does that mean? How do you interpret that? |
| 45:51 | Russ Roberts: So, I want to go back one second, and then I want to read what you say about habits because it is, I think, so fascinating, eloquent as well. This idea that you get bit by a dog and your brain learns very quickly what a dog is that doesn't look anything like the dog that bit you. Different color, different species, doesn't matter: The brain is able to generalize. Of course, it makes mistakes, too. It's a bias. Bias is powerful. It helps you generalize. It also leads you astray, if I can use a bad--make a bad pun about dogs. It reminds me--a student once said that my exam in economics was unfair because, quote, "Professor Roberts expected us to apply the material to things we'd never seen before." That was, yes, that was the goal, and that's called thinking. Russ Roberts: So, if you know four times six is 24, and then I said, 'Well, what's four times seven?' and you said, 'Well, I don't know. You haven't taught me that,' well, then I didn't do a good job because I didn't teach you what multiplication really is. Russ Roberts: And, the whole idea would be that I don't have to teach you every single case of math and multiplication. It's good to know that by heart; it obviously saves time. It's a habit. But, the amazing thing that you're referring to is the ability to learn and to carry knowledge forward and generalize is unique to human beings, more or less. There's some obviously animals that can do versions of it. But I want to read your quote about habits because it has a thing at the end that's really quite spectacular. Quote: We tend to think of habits as bad things, but really they're tremendously useful shortcuts that enable animals, including us, to navigate familiar settings and scenarios in adaptive ways with a minimum of cognitive effort and time expended on deliberation. We've done all the hard work of thinking about this already, so why do it again? Our brains know how things are going to turn out, broadly speaking, if we behave in tried and true ways in most of our everyday contexts. Okay, that's the first part of the quote, but here's the punchline, which I think is just spectacular. You write: People are sometimes asked, "If you could go back in time and give your younger self some advice, what would it be?" In reality, what happens is precisely the opposite: our past selves are giving advice to our present self all the time to ensure it has the best possible future. End of quote. Expand on that. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. I mean, thank you for reading that out because I think that for me was--when I got that concept, I felt like it was going to be useful. Because, that's basically what learning is, right? We have learned from the past, and it extends into the future. But, the other thing that this encapsulates is, again, a kind of a deeper metaphysical question of what it means to be a self. And, for in a physics kind of a frame of mind or even a neuroscience frame of mind, the self is just the physical organization of a thing right now at this moment in time. And, to me, that's just physical stuff. That's not the self. The self is the continuity of that pattern through time. And, for us to be a self means not just maintaining this pattern of physical processes, it means maintaining our psychological selves, our biographical information, all of the knowledge that we've learned, all of the habits that we've picked up, plus all of the projects that we've committed to that extend into the future. I mean, right now I'm committed to all kinds of things that I'm doing over time that will continue to inform my behavior even though the choice I made to do them might have happened a long time ago. If somebody chooses to go to college, then they've made a choice that informs, but also constrains what they're going to do over every day for the next four years or whatever it is. So, the necessary thing is to think of the self as having this extension through time. And, actually it's got temporal parts. So, we like to think of ourselves as having spatial parts. Of course, we do: we've got hands, and legs, and arms, and heads, and whatever. But we've also got temporal parts. Right? And so, right now I'm a part of myself, and that self extends through time and includes my past and future selves. So, sorry, that got a little philosophical. |
| 50:23 | Russ Roberts: No, it's really important. It's really important because it gets at--what I love about one of your critiques of the free will concept is that it helps to frame it as constraints. So, when I make--the famous example is Ulysses--Odysseus binds himself to the mast because he doesn't want to be seduced by the song of the sirens in The Odyssey. And so, is he constrained? Is he constrained if he chose to be constrained? How do you start to think about that? And, your point is that: That's not constrained. That's a constraint that was chosen. So, it's not a constraint the way the determinists might think about it. And, you point out, and this is what I think is really beautiful. It's a philosophical observation but it's quite spectacular: If I was unconstrained--so I'm not at the whim of my past. I'm not at the whim of my DNA and the way it was encoded, I'm not at the whim of the way I was raised by my parents. I'm free. I've got free choice. And that's free will. And, your point is--I'll let you elaborate on it--but the way I understood it was, your point is that that's not even a meaningful statement. I mean, how could that possibly be? It's not a person if you have no history, no biology. Russ Roberts: So, of course we're constrained. The question is, can we choose within those constraints to do things? Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. That's exactly right. And, I think the reason I set that up that way is that because some people argue for this absolutist version of free will where they say, 'If you're subject to any constraint whatsoever when you're making a decision, then you're not free, and you don't have free will.' It's like an all-or-nothing kind of scenario. And what I wanted to say was: Well, think about the scenario you're proposing here, where I can act for no constraint--which means for no reason, with no history, I'm not allowed to have any memory of anything, I'm not allowed to have learned anything because any of those things is a constraint on my behavior. Yeah, it just becomes a meaningless thing where actually what happens in that scenario is the self evaporates. There's nothing left. There's just a random behavior generator. So, it was a way to say that that objection, by setting up free will in that way, it just becomes an absurd kind of thing. It's not what we're talking about. Russ Roberts: It's a strongman. Kevin Mitchell: Exactly. Exactly. And, much more realistic is to say: Well, yes, I am constrained. I'm constrained to act like a human being by millions of years of evolution. And I'm constrained to act like me by all of my past. And, me acting like me is just what it means to be me. There isn't anything else. In fact, when people really act out of character, it's often a sign of mental illness. Right? I mean, we take that as a pathology when people start acting in ways that are not their normal personality, or against their own interests, or in ways that are sort of unusual given their biographical history and their psychology. So, that just is what it means to be you. And then the question is: Okay, within that--within that set of constraints--is it so much constrained that at any moment you actually have no choice? You're in so much control of yourself that you've ended up with no choice. And that's sort of where Robert Sapolsky ends up. It's sort of an ironic point that is like, we're so controlled by our psychology that it leaves us with no choice. And, there's just actually no evidence for that. And in fact, when we're making decisions under conflict--I mean, there's lots of habitual things that we do where we predecided. That's fine. There's some scenarios you can imagine where you don't care what the outcome is. If I say, 'Do you want Coke or Pepsi?' you may not have a preference. But, if I'm your waiter and you're there at a restaurant, and other people are waiting for you to make your decision, there's a time constraint. What's important is that you decide one or the other. Right? And, actually there's very good evidence that we can use kind of some of the noisiness of our mental neural processes as a resource to break a tie there, for example, so when you don't know. So, you can have a habitual response, you can have an arbitrary response, or you can have a response where you do care--where it's a conflicted scenario, you really care--but you're not sure. You've got good reasons to do both A and B. You can make separate arguments to yourself. You can deliberate over those. And then, at the end of that process--at the beginning of that process, it's not determined. It's really open what you're going to do. And, by the end of it, you will have decided, by weighing up these different reasons and against each other. And, it's just not the case that you're running the parameters of a scenario through a preset algorithm where the weights of these different factors are already set. What you're doing in deciding is figuring out what those weights should be. Because it's not just one thing at a time, it's lots of them, right? So, that's a process that, on the psychological level, that feels like what deliberation is doing; on the neural level that looks like what the deliberation is; and, on a philosophical level, you can just say, 'Well, that's the agent deciding.' Like, what more do you want? Well, that's what's happening. |
| 56:12 | Russ Roberts: Let me give you a harder case. And, I'm trying to resist being a cheerleader because I do like what you're saying; but let me try to give you a more challenging case. You gave the example of Coke and Pepsi. Do you drink either of those? Kevin Mitchell: Rarely. And, when I do, I prefer Coke, as it happens. Russ Roberts: Okay. But, in my case, I literally don't like Pepsi. And the reason--I used to drink Tab, which is a drink that some of our older listeners may remember. And when Diet Coke came along, I thought, 'This is awful. I can't stand this.' But, I got used to it, and it became my drink of choice for a long time. So, that's a simple example. But let me take a variation on that. So, my wife and I have coffee every morning, almost every morning. And, I like my coffee with a lot of cream or milk, and a lot of sweetener. Some people would say I actually like drinking sweet milk with a little bit of coffee flavor. And, I don't think it's so good for me to drink that milk and the sweetener. It's really--it's chemicals, or if it was sugar, it's not good for me either. So, every once in a while I say, 'Well, I'm going to drink it without those things. I'm just going to drink my coffee black.' And, I hate it. But, I'm also aware in the back of my mind that if I did it for a month or two, it would become what I'm used to. And, the coffee I drink now would become cloying and disgusting. It's so sweet--which is what my wife says about many of the drinks I love. She just can't drink them, and they're my favorites, like Diet Coke, say. So, let's talk about that process. I have a choice tomorrow morning. I can have my coffee black or without those things, and I convince myself that I like it with the sugar and the cream. There is a chance. I think I have agency. I think I can give those up, and I could fool myself into saying I choose not to. But, you as the outsider might say, 'His self-control is a mixed bag. I think he's just fooling himself. He's had it with the milk and the sugar or the sweetener so many times he can't choose anymore. He's stuck. That habit has burned into the--this is a variation on what I asked Guarav Suri about--I've lost my autonomy there. How do you think about that kind of situation? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. So, first of all, I think there's a whole kind of suite of things happening there. It's a whole set of-- Russ Roberts: So, to speak-- Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, sorry-- Russ Roberts: Sweet-- Kevin Mitchell: conflicting motivations that you're trying to navigate through and operate over. And so, what's interesting is that as a human being, you have some awareness of those things, some meta-awareness of those things. Right? So, any animal can do things for reasons. Many animals can learn things about the world. They can think about what they should do, they make decisions, and so on. But they don't necessarily have this extra level, this meta-cognitive level, where they're aware of those kinds of things, and they have an ability to plan further into the future. Which is really the--human's cognitive superpower is that the future for us is open-ended, right? It's not just an hour from now, it's not just a minute from now, or a day from now. It's: We can think millennia in the future if we want to, even after our own lifetimes. So, that ability means that what--now, far future goals become part of the calculus of our decision-making. Right? So, you might say--I mean, in the example you gave with artificial sweeteners, it's probably not going to have health effects. But, say, you were a sugar addict there, and your doctor said, 'Well, you have incipient diabetes. You really need to cut out this sugar.' Well, now you'd have two conflicting goals. You have a short-term hedonic drive in the sense that you like the taste of sugar, and you're used to it, and your brain is kind of expecting it. And then, you have this longer term conflicting goal, which is you don't want to become unhealthy, and so you're trying to weigh these things up against each other. So, this is where we get this question of meta-volition: Can we control our own desires? Russ Roberts: And, this is something that, as Harry Frankfurt said, 'We're the only animal,'--the philosopher, said, 'We're the only animal that has desires about our desires.' And, I guess what I'm asking is: Can I control that desire about my desires? I like the idea of it. I have a feeling about it. But can I do anything about it? Kevin Mitchell: So, I think what's interesting, you can phrase that question in two ways. You can say: Is that something humans can do as a species? Is that an ability that humans have generally speaking? And then, you can ask: Maybe it's also true that some humans have it more than others. Right? I mean, it's perfectly possible that what we call free will in humans on the philosophical front is basically equivalent to what psychologists call executive function, which is the ability to control impulses, to operate with multiple things in your mind at the same time, to keep something in working memory, to switch between tasks if conditions change or payoffs change, and to resolve conflicting goals over multiple timescales. And, some people are better at those things than others. Some people are more impulsive than others. And so, I think that's true for multiple reasons. It's probably true in terms of just some innate traits that people have of being more impulsive or not, but it's also that these are learned skills. Right? Executive function is not just a bunch of faculties that emerge from nowhere. They are skills that we learn. And those--I mean, anyone who is raising kids knows that we go to quite some effort to tell them, 'No, you can't have everything you want the second that you want it.' Or, 'You have to put your own needs behind someone else's. You have to share your sweets. You have to act in a pro-social way.' All of those elements are inculcating skills of self-control, and rational, and also especially pro-social behavior on which our culture and civilization depends. So, all of those elements, they require this meta-capacity for meta-volition, and that's effortful. And, over a lifetime, it begins with a kind of a teaching or indoctrination, but eventually those ideas--or: it's good to share things, it's good to not be selfish, it's good to plan and not have immediate gratification all the time--they become internalized. And they become part of our cognitive machinery, basically, that informs what we're doing: Not just, 'What do I want to do now?' but, 'What should I want to do now? What should my desires be here?' It's a kind of a conscience, right? An internal check that eventually ultimately manifests in what we call morality as an emergent--not just as an emergent system in a society, but as an emergent suite of psychological faculties that we each employ, unless we're psychopaths, in our daily lives. |
| 1:03:59 | Russ Roberts: So, I want to talk about that for a minute. Maybe more than a minute. It's such an interesting question. One of the most powerful parts of that William James essay I mentioned, "The Dilemma of Determinism," is he points out that if you think everything is predetermined--he gives an example of a brutal, sadistic murder of a man who kills his wife; and, despite her pleas for mercy, kills her in a very horrible way. Most of us would believe that he could have done otherwise. He was not an automaton. He was not programmed in any way to do that. Most of us would believe that it is possible that after he did it, he would have regret. It is also true that many of us would judge him. And, James's point is that all those emotions: judgment, regret, the decision to go through with this in a rage, or in--he was calm to make it a better story. In a deterministic world, those are just meaningless. There's nothing--you can't judge him. It was predetermined from the Big Bang onward. Shame--one's own shame--is meaningless. In the deterministic world, you should never be ashamed of something you did because you had no choice. And, we all rebel against this in all kinds of ways. And, in determinism, you bear no guilt for your actions, and you earn no praise. So, this idea that character is something you build, or that you inculcate in your children, again, it's just a pitiful human error. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. It's just a conceit or an illusion. Russ Roberts: It's a conceit. And, James has a fascinating set of observations about this; but again, I don't want to go down that road. But here's my question. I think we both agree that that's--it's not a world I want to live in, and I don't think it's the world I actually live in. So, let's say, through a set of--well, I'm not going to say how it happens, but I become a better person. My character improves. I don't look away from my wife at the football game. I give up the sugar in the coffee. I help more old people across the street, carrying their groceries for them. I give up my seat on the bus for someone even older than I am--and people give up their seat all the time for me, which is fascinating, here in Jerusalem at least. So, I become a better person. I visit more people in the hospital, etc., etc. And, I feel good about myself, because I used to be really not so nice. But, should I feel better, good about myself? I mean, isn't that just another example of how I was raised? I may have rebelled against it or younger. Just another example of the suite of neurons, and other things I have in this [?] mine. Should I feel proud of myself--quietly, of course? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, it's--quietly. Right, right. Yeah. No, I mean, all of these things are super-interesting. And I guess there's multiple levels to these processes. So, the first thing, thinking about these emotions, we have these social emotions, so shame, and guilt, and praise, and admiration, and so on. These are social emotions that arise in response to people's actions, judged through the lens of whether they're pro-social or not. And, I think evolutionarily speaking, you could see why a species that relies on pro-sociality would have these emotions. They have a functional role to play in making sure that we keep each other acting in the way that's most beneficial for everybody. Right? And, that's why we have been able to survive in communities. So, there's a sort of a naturalistic way to think about morality as just a system that helps reinforce pro-social, communal behavior that then gets internalized into our psychology. Now, the other one that you mentioned there was regret. And, this becomes amazing, because regret is actually guiding our actions all the time, but in an anticipatory way. So, a lot of the time what we're thinking is, 'Okay, I've done something in the past; it didn't turn out well. It was greeted with social opprobrium and shame because it was seen as antisocial, and I didn't enjoy that experience. And so, I regretted having done that.' Now, all of us have had occasions like that where we've regretted doing things, right? And we learn not to do that particular thing again. But we also can generalize beyond specific cases to say, 'If I did X right now, these would be the consequences. And, some of them I might like, but some of them I would regret because other people would judge me in this way. Or I might even judge myself. I might disappoint myself in that situation.' And then, the anticipatory regret is part of the system of decision making. Right? That's one of the parameters that is weighed when you're judging different kinds of scenarios. So, this forward-looking aspect of our decision making, informed by our past through the lens of other people's judgments that might occur if we did A, B, or C--all of that is crucial to the way that we guide our own behavior and the way that we build our own character. And I think the distinction between character and personality is really interesting. You can think of--with infants, say, we talk about things like temperament where some animals--some animals--some infants are just more active. Say, they're higher surgency, they call it, than others, right? But, you can't tell if they're extroverted or not because it just doesn't make any sense for a baby. Right? But later on, they will have these personality traits: how conscientious they are, how neurotic. And, we talked about how impulsive people are, and things like that, that are--they're really sort of not things that we choose. They are underlying predispositions. And I have a previous book we called Innate, which is all about how those things come about. But, the idea that our behavior, then, is just determined by those things in a way that sort of doesn't involve us is just a naive misconception. Right? There are predispositions, but they're just a baseline. They're just a kind of tuning of some internal parameters that inform how we meet the world and how we engage with it. But, over time, what we're actually doing is building up these characteristic adaptations to our experiences, given the way that we've felt them and experienced them, which is partly due to our innate psychology, and so on. So, you get this sort of emergent kind of entrenchment of what becomes character through our experiences, but not in a way that those experiences are just things that happen to us: where we're passive in this process. If we're actively making choices, then the way our character emerges is as a result of the accumulation of all those choices that we have made, some of which are choices about the basis on which we've made those choices. Right? So, yeah, it is, I hope, a more nuanced view of character as this thing that emerges through a trajectory of a lifetime, that we are involved in that. It's not just things that happen to us: It's our active choices. And again, you know, some people are more actively aware of, more mindful of those things than others. We can be more mindful of them on some occasions than on others. I think if we're harried, if we're stressed, if we're tired, we're probably acting in different ways, and ways that we might say, 'I regret doing. I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have said that. I shouldn't have snapped at this person. I was tired, I was irritated,' and so on. We understand that. I think when we're interacting with other people, we realize that not everyone is fully in control of everything that they're doing at every moment. And, in fact, we recognize in extreme cases in the law, for example, that some people have diminished responsibility--people with mental illness, or some kind of impairment, maybe psychosis, with drug addiction, or with some kind of compulsion. We recognize that they have less of that kind of control over their own actions. Or if they're inebriated, or even if they're a child versus an adult. We recognize that those are skills that emerge through time, and they require maturation and experience. So, rather than having this sort of thing where it's either 100% free will--totally unconstrained, this magic, metaphysical nonsense notion. Or, it's the choices are either that, or you're just robots carrying out your programming at every moment. There's no reason to accept either of those extremes. We can have a position in the middle where we say free will is the term that we use for an evolved suite of biological capacities that people may have to varying extents, that they exercise to varying extents, that may be constrained to varying extents in different circumstances and conditions. And, all of that is a way of recognizing, I think, our core humanity as being autonomous agents, but also recognizing the limitations on it, and the ways that it can be infringed in many, many different kinds of ways. |
| 1:14:28 | Russ Roberts: Well, the thing I like in my individual interactions with other people, or at least the way I like to think of myself trying to be--and the way you talk about it I think is very powerful, and the way you write about it: Behavior is multifaceted. It's not caused by this lockstep reaction to all these different factors. All these different factors are going on; and yes, we deceive ourselves, which we haven't talked about. We often will say, 'Oh, I did that because,' when in fact it was 12 things. Or, 'That person did that because,' and it was 12 things. But, one thing is--we like one thing. Russ Roberts: But, when I'm looking at you, and you do something that I think is cruel or selfish, I like to think that that's not all you are. I'm not going to pick the one thing. I'm going to say, 'Well, maybe he was just really tired, and maybe he had a fight with a friend the night before. Or maybe he had a bad visit to the doctor.' And, I really love not judging you when you fail. And, I actually really like praising you when you succeed. So, if you visit the person in the hospital, I'm going to presume you have a good heart, and not because you want to impress, say, your colleagues. So, that's the way I want to behave as an individual in the world looking at others. Russ Roberts: Looking at myself is different. Looking at myself, I want to be a little tougher on myself. I also want to forgive myself, but that's a whole other conversation. But, what I want to add is that the state--the state cannot act the way I act. In other words, if the state says, 'Oh, as a criminal, a murderer, he probably had a bad childhood.' And, similarly, 'This person created something fantastic, but he doesn't deserve earning a lot of money from it because it just means he had good parents, and he was on the far right-hand side of the tail, the right-hand tail of the focus, concentration, obsessive work,' etc. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Russ Roberts: I don't want to live in that world, where the government acts that way. And the reason is, is because--and I think I talked about this with Sapolsky. I don't remember what he said. And I also talked a little bit about it with Sam Harris--a little bit in our morality conversation: we talked a little bit about morality. Deep down, it does make a difference. We don't believe that it doesn't matter whether you punish criminals or not--most of us. We don't believe it, 'Oh, this reward? They don't need reward. Incentive is not important, financial incentives, to get people to do the right thing because it's all baked in.' We don't feel that way. And, we don't actually think, 'Oh, I can't help myself by putting this penalty on. It just must have been preordained.' We act as if we have agency, and I think that we're rewarded with knowledge and information that confirms it, that we're right. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. No, I mean, I agree. I take it very, I guess, a pragmatist's view. You talked about William James and that pragmatist tradition of thinking about systems like morality and our social conventions that have built up around them. Where, it's very hard to do some philosophical exercise or thinking about free will in this absolutist sense, and then say what the implication should be for something as complicated as our legal system. Or even just something as complicated as the normal kinds of modes of interaction that we have with each other, where holding each other accountable for things, and holding ourselves accountable for things, is just a normal part of that process. We think about moral responsibility as this burden, but your responsibility is my rights. Those are two sides of the same coin, and that's just how society works. So, I think for me, the important thing is to say: Look, you can't really draw sweeping kinds of conclusions about the way society should be structured, or a particular system should be structured, based on these metaphysical claims, or arguments, or conclusions. But, they can inform them. But, they can inform them, they can be taken in multiple different ways because there's just layers, and layers, and there's always a counter-argument. You say, 'I shouldn't blame this person for committing this terrible crime, but on the other hand I should protect other people in society from them. And I also should not lock them away forever, and I should give them a chance to be rehabilitated.' So, all of these things, factors, are there. I guess the one thing I would say is that there's a history of many smarter people than me thinking about these things, in terms of sociology, and jurisprudence, and the legal systems that we have, and moral philosophy, and all these sorts of other aspects. It's not like the lawyers and the sociologists have been waiting for the neuroscientists to show up and say, 'How should we think about these complex things?' Yeah, it's a slightly arrogant idea that we could have the answer to these complex questions. I think there's information that we can offer that's important to take into account so that we're not deceiving ourselves. But, there's so many layers of complexity beyond what I've talked about in those other realms that, yeah, I don't feel confident extrapolating, and I wouldn't argue that anyone else should, either. Russ Roberts: One thing that's fascinating about this--as you point out in the book; we've alluded to it briefly--these arguments are not just from the 20th century. William James wrote in the 1800s--I think the essay we're talking about, I think he gave it as a talk, I think, at Harvard Divinity School in 1884 or so, 1888. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. 1888, I think. Yeah. Russ Roberts: And, my colleague here, who I mentioned earlier, he said, 'We haven't really made any progress since then. That's as good an answer as you can find.' He might like your book as a more thorough answer, but he thinks James had it right, and it hasn't changed much. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, I think Epicurus had it right, and that was 2500 years ago. Russ Roberts: That's what I was going to say. The amazing thing is that before we had any great scientific knowledge, there are people on both sides of this. But, the determinists were arguing for determinism long before modern science, which is fantastically amazing. |
| 1:21:40 | Russ Roberts: I want to read a passage that is about the dynamism of the self that you talked about earlier, and then I'm going to ask you a hard question. I think it's a legitimate question, but we'll see. Here's the quote: That lets us recognize something vitally important: Life is not a state; it is a process. You are not just alive, you are living. That is an activity you are doing, that each of your cells is doing. You are more than the pattern of physical matter that makes up your body right now: you are that pattern persisting through time. The individual atoms and molecules and selves that make up the pattern are being turned over and exchanged with the outside world all the time, but the pattern remains.
Life is thus like a storm, or a tornado, or a flame: none of these things is made of the physical atoms or molecules contained in it at any moment. Those elements would be replaced in the next moment. The storm is the ongoing process that is organizing or constraining all those molecules into a higher-order pattern. It's the physical relations between all the elements that is maintained. The difference is that storms or flames fairly quickly blow or burn themselves out, but life does not: life goes on. [Italics original] End of quote. It's a beautiful statement of what you were talking about earlier. But here's what's funny about it. I don't know, again, if I'm being fair or not. But, it's a very Buddhist conception of life, the dynamism. And yet, your conception of the self would, I think, be rejected by the Buddhists-- Russ Roberts: Because they believe the self-is an illusion-- Kevin Mitchell: That's right. Russ Roberts: So, I don't know. Have you thought about that at all? Russ Roberts: And, do you want to comment on that? Please do. Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. No: It's a great observation, and thanks for the question. I've had some discussions with Buddhist practitioners and philosophers about this idea. So, the notion in Buddhism is that if you look inside yourself to try and find where this self is, you won't find anything. This is an old idea: David Hume also talked about this. Sam Harris talks about this a lot--where the idea is, like, there isn't that part of the brain, you can't find inside your brain, where the self is. Russ Roberts: The manager-- Russ Roberts: Where's the person in charge? I want to talk to that person-- Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right: I want to talk to the manager. Right. You won't find them in there. Okay? And, I think that that's absolutely true, but it also doesn't mean that the self doesn't exist. So, there's a kind of a sleight of raising here that happens when people say, 'The self is an illusion,' because illusion can be taken in two different ways, and what they mean is usually: It's not what we think it is. That's fine. Lots of things are not what we think they are. Gravity is not what we think it is, but I'm not going to jump out the window. Right? So, things can be not what they think they are and still have an existence. So, they often will justify the claim on the basis it's not what we think they are, but then in some cases they'll make hay by smuggling in the other meaning of illusion, which is: It's not a thing at all. It's not real. So, I'm happy to say the self is not what we think it is, in a naïve, folk-psychology kind of a way, but that doesn't mean it's not a thing and not real. You can draw an analogy--basically, what I would say is that the self is this bundle of ongoing interests, and all our memories, and everything else about us--this pattern that persists through time, which in human beings includes all of the psychological aspects that are instantiated in that pattern. And, that's fine. Like, if someone wants to say to me, 'You're nothing but a bundle of Kevin-interests, and Kevin-memories, and Kevin-goals, and desires, and ongoing projects, and commitments,' and so on, I'd be, like, 'Okay, that's fine. I don't mind that.' I still, as a self, have some causal power because those things give me reasons. Right? Now I've got Kevin-reasons, and I've got Kevin-control over things that happen. So, you can say, just in neuroscience-y kind of terms, that the self is present in the way that there's a sort of a centralized locus of control. Right? And it has to be centralized, because we can only do one thing productively at a time; and so we need a system that actually can make an all-things-considered judgment about the state of the world, and all our goals, and so on. And then, execute in a competitive fashion one option over another. That's just the way the control system is designed. The other aspect you can think--well, we were talking about Coke and Pepsi earlier. If you go to the Coca-Cola building, and you go into Coca-Cola and say, 'Where's Coca-Cola? Where's this Coca-Cola, that thing?' You won't find it in there. You will find managers and so on, but they're not Coca-Cola. The CEO [Chief Executive Officer] is not Coca-Cola. There's a corporation that exists as a whole abstract entity that's ongoing. There's turnover of people within it. It exerts control as an entity in the marketplace, and so on. And that's fine. I think that's right to think of a corporation as a wholistic entity in that way, where you can't reductively identify some bit within it that is the essence of the entity. Right? And I would think the same thing for us. |
| 1:27:28 | Russ Roberts: So, let's close with a--I might make a confession, and I'm curious for your thoughts. I suspect--I don't know how many people are still listening to this conversation-- Kevin Mitchell: Everyone. Everyone's still listening-- Russ Roberts: I'm sure they've all been fascinated. But some of them may have fallen by the wayside. And I mention that because I find this, I think, much more fascinating than the average person. I suspect you do, too. And, one of the reasons I find it fascinating is that it deeply enhances my sense of being a person. Sometimes I'll find myself in a social situation--I'm at a sporting event or I'm getting on the bus--and I look around, and here are all these people. I know something about them, I'm pretty sure. They all have brains, they're something like mine. They're on their phone, they're talking to their friend, they're reading a book, whatever it is, they're gazing off into the distance. And--this is not an erotic comment--I imagine, I think about how strange it is that they're wearing clothes. Because we're all just a bunch of animals; and we have these weird civilizational protentions of clothing, and manners, and we're on a bus that humans created. And, every once in a while I think it's really kind of an extraordinary thing that we're something more than just biological creatures. And, more than that, we're biological creatures that think a lot about what it's like to be a biological creature with a brain. And I think we're the only biological creatures that do that--who wonder why we're here, and make up or receive information about that question, and think about it. And, the reason I like your book is that it reminds me about that, and it forces me to think about it. And, when I go home to dinner tonight with my wife and I give her my undivided attention--and I don't check my email or a sporting event--I feel good about myself. And I remember that that's not easy, and I'm going to work at it. And I'm curious: you spent a lot more time than I did with your book, writing it. Did it force you to change the way you go through the world in any way like that? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah, yeah. Russ Roberts: My hat's off to you, it affects me. How about you? Kevin Mitchell: Yeah. It's funny. It was such a process for a long period of time that I imagine that it has changed me, but in such gradual ways that I might not have noticed. But, yeah, there are occasions where absolutely I'll try to take a kind of a step back from the immediacy of, say, the emotionality of a situation, and recognize what's going on sort of internally, and say, 'Okay, I'm not forced to think like this. I can have a broader sort of appreciation of what's going on.' You know, I think there's whole sorts of areas of psychotherapy, actually, that are really aimed at this kind of thing. Where, one of the elements of psychotherapy can be: becoming aware that you are reacting to things instead of responding to them. Right? So, if you're very reactive, you can learn that. Right? And you can learn certain ways to not be like that. And, for some people, it impairs their living, and it becomes a kind of a pathology, and they seek help for it, and so on. So, those are ways in which that sort of meta-awareness of the way that your mind is configured is valuable. And, you know, the admonition to know thyself, I think, is a kind of a power. Right? Russ Roberts: Yeah. Kevin Mitchell: It does give an extra power. Of course, it's not easy to wield that at every moment, but I think it's worthwhile trying. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Kevin Mitchell. His book is Free Agents. Kevin, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Kevin Mitchell: Thanks very much, Russ. It's been a pleasure. |
Are we truly characters with agency, or are we just playing out our programming in the great video game of life? Contrary to those in his field who claim that free will is an illusion, neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell insists that we're agents who wield our decision-making mechanism for our own purposes. Listen as the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why the debate between free will and determinism rests on a flawed foundation, and how the evolution of the ability to make choices and take actions provides the best argument for human agency. Topics include why habits, rather than simply limiting our freedom, also help us live better lives, and the role emotions such as guilt, shame, and regret play in building our character.
READER COMMENTS
Matt
Dec 15 2025 at 11:38am
This is not meant to be mean. Just a comment on human nature.
It is fantastic to see how far people will go to rationalize away reality. But they can do no other. As Schopenhauer noted, “We can do what we want, but we cannot will what we will.” And boy oh boy, do we ever want to believe there is a causeless cause overriding the laws of physics.
“I deserve all my accolades!”
https://www.mattball.org/2025/02/free-will-is-new-jesus.html
Krishnan Chittur
Dec 15 2025 at 12:48pm
An interesting dynamic is happening in the AI world – so far, most (almost all?) AI companies are developing their products driven by the idea that if everything that was ever known is fed to their software engines (yea, incl. neural nets) they can create anything any human has ever known – i.e. purely deterministic. Recent reports from claude.ai indicated something startling – in a highly controlled environment, their AI engine decided it would blackmail someone with information that it deduced from everything it was fed – so was that deterministic? An argument can be made that it was even as it is challenging to connect the dots from raw data to interpretations.
For the many very religious adherents, the world is totally deterministic and they can explain away everything and anything – randomness, chaos are all also built in and in their view, physics rules and yea, once the state of a system is known at t=0, everything in the future will be predictable.
“Free will” is very challenging to “prove” (or even demonstrate) – so yea, arguments can be made about free will or a totally deterministic world.
(Ofcourse if in the near future, AI engines start creating and innovating like what we humans do, we may have to question what we think we know about software, codes and coding – but even then someone will come up with an explanation of why even that was predicted!)
Eric
Dec 15 2025 at 1:28pm
I thank Kevin Mitchell both for
1. For reminding us that even physics shows indeterminism (not determinism as so many assume), and
2. For (unintentionally) showing us that materialism must be false — in large part because of what he astutely observes.
Mitchell is correct that life is fundamentally different, though he doesn’t look quite deep enough. Even for the simplest cell, to live requires being able to do the work required to live and to reproduce. Work requires energy. Mitchell’s own observations about constraints apply. Energy is not self-directing. It cannot choose to do any of the specific tasks needed for life and reproduction. Energy must be constrained by complex material structures so that it is harnessed, transmitted, and applied to the specific tasks needed for living and reproducing.
Likewise, those complex material structures are composed of more basic material building blocks that can be built into the many molecular machines that are required. Mitchell’s observations about constraints apply here as well. The material building blocks are not self-directing. The blocks cannot know within themselves when they should be combined in this way and when in that way and when in some other way. Their construction must be constrained.
The distinctive foundation for all living organisms is functional coded information and the information processing systems that can provide the suitable constraints on building the molecular machines that are required to constrain energy to the tasks for life and reproduction. This cannot emerge over the course of many generations. Unless this is present and working in the first cell, that cell cannot live or reproduce. There would never be a next cell or a next generation. As Mitchell said:
Whenever unguided, unconstrained matter is left to operate merely according to chance and the necessity of physical and chemical laws so that there are only “happenings”, that never seeks to try to “do” anything like encode information and the information processing structures required for life. On its own, just-happening matter cannot “try” to create the operating system that life requires. We consistently observe that this “just-happening” matter produces variations of dead, just-happening matter with no progression ever toward coded information and information processing.
Natural processes can create “persisting” arrangements of matter, such as a rock, but a rock is not life. (FYI: Even if such processes could make prebiotic RNA, RNA is highly non-persisting.) Life is far different from merely “persisting” matter. It must be constrained to do the work of living and reproducing.
Just as unguided ink and paper can never write a novel, unguided just-happening matter can never provide the highly informed constraints and operating system that biological life requires. Those effects must ultimately come from a non-material mind. The bottom line is that the existence of any biological life is incompatible with philosophical materialism.
Eric
Dec 15 2025 at 7:10pm
This leads to an important implication for the discussion of free will and “self”. Since the origin of biological life ultimately requires a preexisting immaterial mind, this excludes the possibility of philosophical materialism. Therefore, there is no basis for excluding the real possibility that dualism is true, i.e. that we are not merely material and that some aspect of our own “self” can be immaterial.
Around 9+ minutes in, Mitchell seems to scoff at the idea that some aspect of you could be immaterial.
However, the subject of veridical near-death experiences is now a field of study with papers appearing in journals such as the medical journal The Lancet and elsewhere. The growing documented evidence increasingly indicates that there is an aspect of “self” that can continue even while the brain is not functioning. Despite Mitchell’s feeling that this kind of idea is “a strange framing”, we have a growing record of individuals who, even as “some free-floating ghost”, have been able to make observations and form memories that are later verified. This is not “strange”, once we discover that materialism is false.
That means that our agency is not confined to the limits of our biology.
Regarding NDE evidence, here is one introductory text.
Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language
Regarding dualism and an immaterial mind, here is another recent offering from a neurosurgeon.
The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul.
Glenn
Dec 15 2025 at 4:46pm
Russ, thanks so much for your episodes on the free will/determinism debate. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Like you, it seems to me that the determinists have a strong case, but I prefer the free will side.
Next time you interview a determinist, ask how they get up in the morning. If everything is determined, doesn’t that make life meaningless? How can they talk about “making a decision”, which they do all the time?
For me the determinist view is absurd and not useful for anything.
Having said that, the free willers need to come up with an explanation of consciousness before we can be certain that it is the correct view.
I’ve been a listener to Econtalk since the beginning and look forward to a new episode every week. Thanks!
Dr G
Dec 17 2025 at 2:43pm
Glenn –
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize determinism as leading to a kind of simplistic nihilism. This is a recurring problem when listening to Russ on this topic. He seems so uncomfortable with the deterministic position that he has trouble giving it a fair hearing. At one point, he dwells on a horrific murder that, in his telling, determinists are fine with, and he goes on to say:
That’s not just a straw man. It reads as genuine contempt for the opposing view. Hume had a clear explanation for why this isn’t a problem for determinism, and Kant had a very different one. You might think both are wrong, but no one (outside of internet trolls) really holds the position Russ attributes to determinists.
It’s not really Kevin’s role in the interview, but I would have liked him to push Russ a little on this. Kevin summarizes his pro–free will position with a scenario:
Interestingly, I think many determinists would happily cosign this account. Clearly, it’s a complex, multi-factor process. Clearly, at the psychological level, we experience something that feels like deliberation. Clearly, at the neural level, the brain is doing something important. So when he concludes that “on the philosophical level… that’s the agent deciding,” that sounds to me like compatibilism. The view that a limited version of free will is compatible with a deterministic universe.
Russ Roberts
Dec 21 2025 at 6:20am
Dr G,
Would love to hear more about how Kant and Hume responded to the question of guilt, shame, and character development.
Dr G
Dec 21 2025 at 12:28pm
Thanks for the reply Russ. I’m not a philosopher, so you’d probably be better off asking your professor friends—but I’ll do my best.
On Kant
Kant needed (or at least believed he needed) some version of free will for the categorical imperative to make sense. But rather than offering a clean metaphysical proof of free will, he largely sidestepped the issue. His move was to point out that deliberation itself presupposes freedom. When a person deliberates, they must assume their reasoning can make a difference. It’s logically incoherent to deliberate while also believing that deliberation has no bearing on anything. So even if hard determinism is objectively true, from the first-person perspective of deliberation we are rationally required to assume free will.
To be fair, Kant thought this had deeper metaphysical argument, but even if you don’t buy that framework, the practical point still stands.
On Hume
Hume was a compatibilist: he believed free will is compatible with determinism. He rejected a “hard” free will that would require an uncaused cause—something that ultimately has to be taken on faith.
For Hume, the will is simply what results from our psychology operating under causal laws. What matters for freedom is not metaphysical indeterminacy, but the absence of coercion. If I choose vanilla over chocolate, that choice is free whether my will is deterministic or divinely inspired. But if you put a gun to my head and order me to take chocolate, then I’m not free.
Hume wasn’t a moral objectivist in a modern sense, but he did think praise and blame were deeply grounded in human psychology and social practice, not mere convention. Classical liberals like John Locke and Thomas Hobbes held broadly similar compatibilist views, which they saw as fully consistent with social contract theory.
Russ, I think you’re saying that this is unsatisfying. If I murder someone am I REALLY to blame in a deterministic world. The compatablists answer is simply, “yes, you are to blame”, but they aren’t weighing in on whether or not that is just human/social/biological blame, or wether it’s also divine.
On Nozick
I’m not entirely sure where Kevin would land, since much of what he said sounds compatibilist to me. But I suspect he’d align more closely with Robert Nozick, who argued for a stronger notion of freedom based on the role our choices play in shaping the kind of person we become over time.
Modern compatibilists like Daniel Dennett tend to respond that this line of argument ultimately goes one of two ways: (1) it collapses back into standard compatibilism, just with more unnecessary steps, or (2) it smuggles in something like an uncaused, soul-level source of agency, without being explicit that this is what’s happening. That said, I’ve never found Nozick’s argument on this point fully convincing, so I am likely being unfair to him (and Kevin?).
Dr G
Dec 15 2025 at 5:43pm
A question for Kevin –Listening to this, I heard you as taking a materialist compatibilist position, very much in line with someone like Dan Dennett. Is that right? I ask partly because, based on past episodes, I would have expected Russ to be more averse to that view, so I’m wondering if I missed something in the discussion.
A comment –I loved the example of bacterial chemotaxis. While it’s often useful to think of bacteria as agents, it’s also a great example of how our tendency to attribute agency can hide incorrect assumptions. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists knew that bacteria swam using flagella and understood many of the molecules involved in controlling them. But many assumed, somewhat simplistically, that bacteria literally swam toward or away from things. It took Howard Berg, a physicist rather than a biologist by training, to show that bacteria instead move by randomly tumbling and then swimming in a new random direction, using a biased random walk to move toward or away from stimuli. The concept of agency obscured the key scientific question. I think about this often in the context of how quickly many people move from “it feels like I have free will” to a whole set of unsubstantiated implications.
Shalom Freedman
Dec 17 2025 at 4:57am
As Kevin J. Mitchell [name corrected from Philips–Econlib Ed.] claims in this interesting conversation with Russ Roberts the question of whether human beings have free will does not have a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. We do have freedom but it is a limited freedom. We do not even have complete control over our own minds and much of what happens within us comes without any conscious decision on our part. We do however make conscious decisions and weigh alternatives. We do contemplate, think of various alternatives, and then decide. We do regret our actions and change our behavior. We do this through much of our waking life. The question of whether everything we do and even more everything that happens is predetermined he also points out has a negative answer. The surprises which effect our lives often have nothing to do with us personally or individually. We are affected in all sorts of ways no one could have possibly predicted. Still we are in many ways and in many situations responsible for our action.
k
David Bergeron
Dec 17 2025 at 3:00pm
Assume we are completely mechanist.
Assume God is not.
Assume he gives us a spirit which is not and can effect the mechanical man.
This harmonizes the conflict for me.
Dr G
Dec 20 2025 at 9:20am
David,
I agree — as you nicely laid out, if one has faith in a divine soul, explaining free will isn’t especially problematic. It’s couldn’t be more straight forward.
But if you’re an atheist, the account you gave doesn’t carry any weight. It’s essentially the same kind of explanation I gave my daughter when she asked about the tooth fairy: assume magic is real; assume the tooth fairy is magic. Bam! Suddenly everything is explained… provided you accept the assumptions.
That’s obviously a silly example, but I raise it because I find it odd how often people will talk round and round about free will, and fail to acknowledge the basic difference in underlying assumptions.
Eric
Dec 23 2025 at 11:20am
Dear Dr G,
You are right to pay attention to assumptions. Some are supported by evidence, others not.
You know that unguided paper and ink could never compose a coded message. Adding unconstrained energy would not help in any way. As Mitchell correctly observed about the dead universe,
In general, unguided mindless matter cannot constrain itself to work toward any future benefit or goal. It can never choose to be “doing” anything, whether to design and create a coding convention or to implement it consistently in molecular machinery or to then use that to store the functional coded information and information processing systems that any first cell must have to live and reproduce (cf. more above).
In light of Mitchell’s discussion of constraints, it is significant that any living organism depends on purposeful, arranged constraints on matter and energy that mindless matter on its own could never seek or provide, regardless of how much time is available. That isn’t something that a dead universe could ever be “doing”. Therefore, we have a scientific basis for the assumption that there must be a preexisting immaterial mind capable of designing and creating life.
Meanwhile, when materialists assume that unguided matter itself somehow behaved in a way that is utterly unlike the patterns that science consistently observes, that becomes an assumption that runs against scientific knowledge about matter/energy and becomes a leap of faith that is contrary to observable evidence regarding the consistent nature and limitations of unguided mindless matter. Nothing we have ever observed supports the assumption that mindless matter could compose meaningful coded information any more than paper and ink could write a message.
Ed Hoopman
Dec 18 2025 at 1:35pm
It seems to me that everything we ever seem to choose can probably be distilled down to a binary decision (albeit preceded by other binary decisions) and at best, environment (including experience and genetics) may influence us to be more likely to pick 0 over 1 in any given case.
But once you resolve the effect of environment, you’re right back down to 0 or 1. It would be a very useful experiment to try to reduce the environmental factors on decisions and see whether the ratio of 1s to 0s wasn’t even.
As much as I like the idea that I get to choose pepsi, it seems fictitious.
Roger D Barris
Dec 25 2025 at 4:48pm
Human beings clearly have the ability to imagine alternative scenarios resulting from our decisions. This ability was both costly to evolve and is costly to implement – for complicated decisions, for example, we can expend a large amount of mental effort considering the possible consequences of alternative decisions. A question for the determinists, therefore, is why our species would have evolved this ability and why our species continues to engage in this costly exercise if, in fact, the exercise is pointless because our decisions are predetermined?
I am curious what Kevin Mitchell thinks of this argument.
Eric
Dec 29 2025 at 5:06pm
Dear Kevin Mitchell,
I hope you are headed to a good start to a good new year. If you have access to The Atlantic, you might be interested in an article that I just read today, which is directly relevant to points you have made.
The Truth Physics Can No Longer Ignore
The fundamental nature of living things challenges assumptions that physicists have held for centuries.
By Adam Frank
That article is like a present that comes gift-wrapped in optimism and hope for the future, but the actual contents provide some much needed truth telling. As the subtitle indicates, it must be acknowledged that some very old assumptions have fallen. There are two related pills to swallow.
1. The assumption of “reductionism” has failed. We need to acknowledge the failure of the idea that everything ultimately can be reduced to the interactions of fundamental building blocks. “…knowing everything about particles isn’t enough to understand reality,”
2. Life depends upon using stored, functional information. “It is the only system in the universe that uses information for its own purposes.” (Side note: “uses … for … purposes” implies “doings” to achieve goals.)
Thinking about the second of these exposes why the first was always a doomed assumption. “To truly understand living systems as self-organized, autonomous agents, physicists need to abandon their “just the particles, ma’am” mentality.”
While I commend Frank for saying as much as he does (even if wrapped in hopeful “this is not a problem” tones), he is coming late to the party. As far back as origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel’s 1973 book The Origins of Life: Molecules and Natural Selection, Orgel coined the phrase “specified complexity” (his own emphasis in the original) to distinguish the function complexity found only in living organisms from the unspecified (i.e. random, arbitrary) complexity found anywhere else in nature. Frank failed to mention the essential difference between random or arbitrary complexity (which is common) and the specified complexity that distinctively makes life possible.
Related to that, the research review textbook The Mystery of Life’s Origin (first edition way back in 1984) plainly discussed that there were no natural process proposals about the origin of life that had ever explained how the unguided processes of a dead, just-happening universe could ever provide the directed work to do what would be needed to build a living, information-processing cell. The fact that nothing else in the natural universe has the specified complexity that life depends on is another clue to the core problem.
The inherent problem is implicit in Frank’s article. Natural process explanations cannot work because reductionism has failed regarding life. Information is never reducible to physical and chemical properties of the matter that holds the encoded information. Even though Frank puts the best face on the situation that he can, there is no possible discovery that would ever change that fundamental fact.
Therefore, nothing we ever could learn about the properties of the parts could ever explain the origin of what life requires. Frank’s hope that an unguided “More” will somehow lead to “emergence” is mistaken and misplaced when it comes to coded information. The information on a page is never reducible to the properties of paper and ink. Nothing we could possibly learn about paper or ink would ever explain the origin of any message. Just adding “More” ink to paper could not ever lead to the “emergence” of any message. This is the essential reason why unguided natural processes cannot create life. Life cannot “emerge” unintentionally, because functional information cannot emerge unintentionally.
You are quite right that we don’t get “…’doings’ in the universe” until after life exists. The implication is that there must be an active, intentional Mind beyond the universe responsible for the designed “doings” that were necessary for life in the universe to begin to exist.
And since that must be so for the origin of life, how does that affect the range of possibilities for the origin of our free will?
Nitin
Jan 1 2026 at 6:27am
How I’m going to be describing what I do at work — “…constraining the possibility space of how things could go at a macroscopic level…”