Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
Authors: Mitchell Kevin J. 
Published: February 2025

DETERMINED: A Science of Life Without Free Will by Robert M. Sapolsky. Penguin, 2023. 528 pages. Hardcover; $35.00. ISBN: 9780525560975. *and *FREE AGENTS: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin J. Mitchell. Princeton University Press, 2023. 352 pages. Hardcover; $30.00. ISBN: 9780691226231. *For almost as long as we have written records, humans have been discussing how free our will is. In ancient times, the constraining factor was typically the gods or fate. There are still today some theologians who believe a proper understanding of the divine compels them to recognize what Luther called "the bondage of the will." That is, on theological grounds, they deny free will. More common now, however, are those who deny any room for free will on the basis of what they consider to be a proper understanding of science. *Prominent among the latter is Stanford biologist and neurosurgeon Robert Sapolsky, whose book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will argues that there is no free will and that if there is no free will, then it is wrong to hold people morally responsible for their actions. His argument against free will rests on two main premises: *1. We know the laws of physics well enough to say that freedom cannot be a property of material entities. *2. Human beings are nothing but matter. *I agree with the claim that there are always conditions around free will, and so to some extent this can condition moral responsibility. Nonetheless, whereas Sapolsky accepts the antecedent (there is no free will) and thus is forced by logic into what he calls the "nutty" consequent (denying moral responsibility), I can't bring myself to believe that people are never morally responsible, and so I have to deny the antecedent. The irony of this is that if Sapolsky is right, then I can't help coming to that position! And I can no more be held rationally responsible than morally responsible on Sapolsky's account. Everything that happens is just the result of the initial conditions and the immutable laws of physics. That is a grim view of the world. *Some will respond that Sapolsky is right about the first premise, but then also claim that we humans have immaterial minds or souls, and that this is the origin of our free will. For us as Christians, that isn't a ridiculous proposition: we are committed to the existence of an immaterial personal being (or rather, tri-personal being), and we believe that such a God has free will. So, I won't claim this response defending free will is unreasonable. But this implies a substance dualism (between physics/brain and mind/soul), and I am not convinced that some kind of substance dualism of human beings is necessary to preserve free will. I am more interested in the project of seeing the continuity of ourselves with the rest of the created order, even though in some ways we are remarkably different kinds of beings. *Is there then a way of showing that free will could have emerged from the evolutionary process that produced our bodies? A new book, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will by Kevin Mitchell, claims to do just that. Mitchell is a professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin. He does not argue from religious grounds at all, and sometimes makes sweeping and unjustified assertions that go well beyond science: "There is no cosmic purpose at play--merely thermodynamic tendencies" (p. 42). What kind of empirical experiment would show that?! But it is true that the facts of science have to be interpreted, and metaphysical commitments certainly come into play. *Most significant in this regard is the ontology of life that Mitchell develops. I have always thought that what Holmes Rolston called the "Three Big Bangs" is a very helpful way of naming important ontological developments in natural history--even if the dividing lines are not absolutely stark: (1) the origin of matter/energy; (2) the origin of life; and (3) the origin of sentience. It seems to me that Sapolsky doesn't really recognize the significance of the second and third of these. For him, living things (and a fortiori sentient humans) are no different in kind than nonliving systems. There might be a greater degree of complexity to our material parts, but essentially we are the same as a tornado or a car (p. 5). *In contrast, Mitchell makes a very important contribution by showing the difference that life makes. He is not reintroducing the kind of vitalism that flourished in the eigtheenth and nineteenth centuries, but simply describing the different way of being that living organisms have, beginning with single-celled organisms. "Life is not a state; it is a process" (p. 26). The material particles, from which an organism is built, are constantly changing. What keeps it identifiably the same organism is a continuity of chemical processes occurring inside a membrane that separates it from the "outside" world. It takes in free energy to keep these processes going, and thus persists through time with a degree of independence from the environment around it. *But aren't these just deterministic processes? No! says Mitchell. Living things are not just input/output machines operating deterministically: "What distinguishes living organisms is that they do things, for reasons. They behave in a truly purposeful manner. This is not an illusion or just a convenient way of talking about them: it's the right way of thinking about them" (pp. 22-23). The ontological category of life must be described differently than matter/energy. *So how can a single-celled organism do things for reasons? There might be some difficulty with language here. Mitchell is not claiming that single-celled creatures have free will, or are sentient, or have moral responsibility for their actions. But he claims that they make decisions based on information--even knowledge--and that is fundamentally different from simply reacting to external stimuli. The information comes first from natural selection: "By continually selecting individuals that are most adapted to their environment, natural selection effectively packs knowledge about the world into the physical structure of living organisms" (p. 49). I found myself continually wondering whether words like "decision" and "knowledge" apply to single-celled organisms, but I am persuaded that whatever we call it, it is different than what goes on in nonliving things and begins to show the building blocks of our free will. *As organisms become more advanced by developing sensors, more information is conveyed into them, and they must develop control systems for acting on that information. The key is that they can represent sensory information internally without acting on it. The more sophisticated organisms become, the control systems guide action over longer and longer periods of time. "Organisms develop internal systems of evaluation that free them from the brutal life-or-death judgment of natural selection. Crucially, all these systems are informational. Meaning becomes the currency of cognition" (p. 67). *Mitchell walks us through increasingly complex organisms like the hydra and C. elegans, and then those with bigger brains, nervous systems, and sensory equipment. We see the rudiments of self-knowledge developing when organisms must be able to distinguish between changes to the immediate environment they have made, versus similar changes made by other organisms. This is not yet the sort of free will that we have, but it is the development of subjective agency, which is another building block for full-blown free will. *Also necessary is that the future is genuinely open. For this, Mitchell leans on an interpretation of time and quantum physics developed by Lee Smolin and Clelia Verde in which what we experience as the present, is simply the transition from the indefinite possibilities of the future to the definite and unchangeable past. The present complete state of a physical system does not fully predict the next state of that system, and that opens the door for "higher-level features to have some causal influence in determining which way the physical system will evolve" (p. 164). My one course in quantum physics more than two decades ago doesn't qualify me to evaluate this interpretation. *The "higher-level features" Mitchell points to are called organizational structures or the functional architecture of the organism. This is where he loses me. He moves from control systems of greater complexity to a sense of self, to higher-level functional architectures that are responsible for choosing among possible options. Over and over, he emphasizes (rightly, to my mind) that it is not neurons or brains that have free will, it is the organism as a whole that does. But I don't see how that has been scientifically explained. *Mitchell has made an important point (which Sapolsky misses) about the categories of life being fundamentally different from nonlife. But now I wonder whether Mitchell has not quite recognized the importance of the third Big Bang: sentience. This too is a different ontological category (though, again, it might come in degrees and resist stark dividing lines), and therefore necessitates different categories of explanation. That doesn't mean you need something more than matter to make it work, any more than we need something more than matter to make life work. But I am not persuaded that we get free will and moral responsibility explained by functional architectures. *Free will is a capacity of sentient beings, and both free will and sentience have so far resisted scientific explanation (the latter being called the "hard problem" of consciousness). Maybe they won't always resist, but even if they do, that shouldn't make us doubt free will any more than we doubt sentience. *Reviewed by Jim Stump, vice president of programs at BioLogos and host of their Language of God podcast. Jim's latest book is The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith (HarperOne, 2024).