If free will exists, evolution is responsible says a neuroscientist

Like most people, I enjoy reading books that I agree with more than books I disagree with. But since I’m such a firm believer that free will is an illusion, after I saw a mention of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, by neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell, I wanted to learn why the author is on board with free will.

I’m just a little ways into the book. So far, I’m enjoying it. Mitchell is a good writer with a pleasing style. He acknowledges that there are sound arguments against free will. He just feels he has some better arguments in favor of it.

Before those who embrace God and the supernatural get all excited, thinking Mitchell is on our side!, let me assure you that he isn’t. The subtitle of his book makes clear that if free will exists, evolution is the reason.

So early on, page three, he states some key assumptions.

Unless you invoke an immaterial soul or some other ethereal substance or force that is really in charge — call it spirit or simply mind, if you prefer — you cannot escape the fact that our consciousness and our behavior emerge from the purely physical workings of the brain.

There is no shortage of evidence for this from our own experience. If you’ve ever been drunk, for example, or even a little tipsy, you’ve experienced how altering the physical workings of your brain alters your choices and the way you behave. There is a whole industry of recreational drugs — from caffeine to crystal meth — that people take because of the way that physically tweaking the brain’s machinery in various ways makes them feel and act.

The ultimate consequence in some cases is addiction — perhaps the starkest example of how our actions can be sometimes be out of our control.

Since the brain produces our behavior, and the workings of the brain are purely physical, free will must reside in the physical brain. I’ve gotten some hints of how Mitchell will argue in favor of free will, but don’t want to speak about this until I get further into the book.

This passage is nicely said and well thought out.

In fairness, free will is a uniquely vexing problem. The phenomenon we are trying to explain — our own experiences of having the power to make choices — seems inherently at odds with what we know about how everything else works in the universe. The scientific rejection of the idea of an immaterial soul or spirit that is somehow pulling the strings has left us scrambling to explain instead how the machine could pull its own strings.

And the progress of physics into the wonderful world of the quantum realm has only deepened the mysteries of what the machine and the world around us are made of in the first place.

But if philosophy can be excused for not having provided an answer, one might at least have hoped for some consensus on what is the right question. The popular framing, “Do we have free will?” is undermined in an obvious way by a lack of agreed-on definitions. If you define the capacity of free will as being able to make decisions in a way that is necessarily free from every prior cause, then you have set an unattainable standard, one that could only be met by supernatural means.

Alternatively, if your criterion is merely that a person is doing things based on causes internal to his or her physical self, then you have not met the challenge of physical determinism but merely sidestepped it with appeals to complexity and unpredictability.

Less obviously, the question, “Do we have free will?” is more deeply undermined by a lack of clarity of the terms “we” and “have.” We cannot profitably approach the question of whether you have free will until we have answered the much more fundamental question, “What kind of thing are you?” The contrasting criteria cited earlier are founded on different conceptions of the nature of the self, where the philosophical footing is equally treacherous.

Without a shared understanding of what everyone is talking about, it’s not surprising that the debate seems to go round and round interminably.