Kevin Mitchell on the Absurdity of Denying Free Will

Kevin Mitchell, a distinguished graduate of Trinity College Dublin, is an Associate Professor in Genetics and Neuroscience. With a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, he has made significant contributions to understanding the genetic program shaping the brain's wiring.

Mitchell's research focuses on genes influencing neuronal connectivity and their implications for psychiatric and neurological diseases. His groundbreaking work extends to his 2023 book, "Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will," exploring, among many other important things, the role of free will in overcoming existential threats like climate change and nuclear weapons.

Kevin Mitchell's multifaceted contributions extend beyond academia, making him a thought leader on the complexities of the human mind.

Time Stamp:

00:00 -- Introductory sequence
01:17 -- Why "Free Agents" is timely and unique
04:19 -- The connection of Free Agents to collective decisions
08:10 -- Mitchell's attempts to re-legitimize purpose
14:05 -- The physics and math of biology and democracy
19:10 -- Mitchell's thoughts about interpretation
21:14 -- BF Skinner and the decline of behaviorism
27:44 -- The fatalism and nihilism of denying free will
28:25 -- The pragmatism of living organisms
32:05 -- The human capacity to think across time horizons
35:20 -- Aharanov's two-state approach and free will
39:00 -- Constraints as causes and top-down causality
44:08 -- Earl Miller and cytoelectric coupling
45:50 -- The role of attraction and repulsion in Mitchell's work
53:40 -- Electromagnetism and the inverse square law
54:30 -- The mathematics of informational causation
56:25 -- Is the principal of least action relevant to Mitchell's work?
59:10 -- Least action and Karl Friston's free energy
62:02 -- What's next for Kevin Mitchell and the book?

[eismscience]

Time Stamp:

00:00 -- Introductory sequence
01:17 -- Why "Free Agents" is timely and unique
04:19 -- The connection of Free Agents to collective decisions
08:10 -- Mitchell's attempts to re-legitimize purpose
14:05 -- The physics and math of biology and democracy
19:10 -- Mitchell's thoughts about interpretation
21:14 -- BF Skinner and the decline of behaviorism
27:44 -- The fatalism and nihilism of denying free will
28:25 -- The pragmatism of living organisms
32:05 -- The human capacity to think across time horizons
35:20 -- Aharanov's two-state approach and free will
39:00 -- Constraints as causes and top-down causality
44:08 -- Earl Miller and cytoelectric coupling
45:50 -- The role of attraction and repulsion in Mitchell's work
53:40 -- Electromagnetism and the inverse square law
54:30 -- The mathematics of informational causation
56:25 -- Is the principal of least action relevant to Mitchell's work?
59:10 -- Least action and Karl Friston's free energy
62:02 -- What's next for Kevin Mitchell and the book?

[zahariachirica]

Robert Sapolsky is right: there's no such a thing as 'free will.

[Bob-vgm]

The fatal flaw in Sapolsky's theory is, if were we mere machines without any form of free will, we'd be as we always had been as a species, as change would not take place. For there to be change we require reflection, and more importantly imagination, which is the driving factor in all forms of progress... as of course is intuition.

[frujf]

Nothing about human behavior suggests that it is disconnected from biological processes. The whole idea is incoherent, or, if you prefer, absurd.

[williamburts]

You are free to use your will to become an alcoholic or drug abuser and you are free to use your will to overcome your addictions. Thus, to me, free will means you are free to use your will to achieve what you desire.

[pindexter]

agreed on the absurdity.

i think therefore i am not ?

[antondubiel]

The belief in free will seems to be mostly motivated by a desire to justify privilege ( the ruling ideas being that of the ruling class) and the denial, I suppose basically, of death and it's challenge to our linguistically constructed mystical homunculus. Sam Harris, Robert Sapolski and many others make an unshakable case that living without free will is not only possible, but necessary if we are to create a truly just society. Free will is really also just an excuse to hurt people the system has condemned as inferior. Best to find a way to think and be without it, which actually happens in caring communities.

[atkatsom]

I must be stupid, but I don't even understand what Mitchell doesn't understand.

Could argue for the existence of god the same way. Feels like he lacks courage and imagination to accept that life may or may not be meaningful independent of the elusive concept of free will. Like we must be the centre of the universe because it is a very dark scary world if aren't.

[sebastianjovancic]

On the part about the mathematics of informational causation, you say that no energy is transferred, but information is.

All information is transferred by physical forces through the exchange of force carrying particles (big possible exception is gravity). For almost all phenomena we speak of in biology, this will primarily be electromagnetic forces so the exchange of photons. The change or exchange of entropy between systems is mediated by the exchange of particles. Even if the entropy changes between two systems without the exchange of particles, such as in the chase of entangled systems, this change of entropy still occurs due to environment interacting with one of the systems through a "measurement".

I think you may be interested in the field of Information theory.

[sebastianjovancic]

I think that, respectfully, there is a commonplace conflation between complexity and agency/free will that underlies people's beliefs in free will.

Suppose you place a ball on a completely symmetric hill. The probability of the ball taking any one path is completely random and evenly distributed. We don't say the ball has free will for "choosing" a particular path, we don't even say it "chooses". Now suppose you change the topology of the hill: you now start affecting the path the ball takes. Now imagine abstracting this over millions, perhaps billions of dimensions. Our minds, in connection with our environment, are simultaneously the ball and that vastly multidimensional topological hill, and as the ball rolls it changes the topology, and the topology affects the path the ball takes. We share this topology with others, we aren't unique, seperate agents, the paths we take are shaped by the world around us, both living and non living things. What makes me *me* is not just my own body and mind, it's me and the world around me. Really we are inseparable from our environment, but it's more pragmatic for us to see our selves as seperate, to consider the world a linear system of black boxes.

The topology is all our biases, our preferences, our wants and needs, shaped by nature and nurture. It's incredibly complex, but it's *ultimately* mechanistic. It gives you what we qualitatively *experience* as free will, but it really is a form of *effective* free will.

[sebastianjovancic]

Are you sure you understood Maldacena correctly regarding the principle of least action? Action can be related proportionally to the integral of proper time (the time experienced by the object in question moving/accelerating). Minimizing the action minimizes this proper time. The line I'v heard is thag it is "the principle of maximal aging" i.e. the *-shortest-* time
Edit: see my response below for a correction and explanation

[mygamecomputer]

People like to point out that measuring the brain suggests that actions are at play before you’re consciously aware of making a decision with your mind and doing something.

The problem is that assumes that the mind works exactly like that. There’s a reason why understanding consciousness is so elusive.

I will say that it is my firm belief that Freewill does exist despite all the people who are desperate for it to not be so.

[paulpaul]

Science & logic won't prove Griff the almighty & all seeing creator exists & they can't prove free will exists either.

[ricardopinzon]

The purpose of a living being is dictated by the history of the being including when the living being was not aware.

[jayanderson]

2:18 He stumbled in his very first utterance. He equates selves and persons. The self is a constructed illusion. No one ever tries to make bad decisions. We make decisions based on our complete context which includes education, morals, rationality, freedom to decide within societal norms and punishments and emotions. I like to feel that I am free to decide but I and everyone knows they have constraints. I feel to only thing I can do is continue to learn and not react before thought and reflection play a part. At the very least we can only make decisions within a very small range of movements.

[lrvogt]

—Particles ARE deterministic (It's why the standard model of particle physics works) and our brains are made of particles.
—Some say that free will must include the idea that we could have chosen otherwise… but those are just words because we didn’t.
—You can do what you want but you can’t choose what you want. (Paraphrasing Schopenhauer)
—To do other than what you want is to want something else more.
—Agency is the ability to choose and act but it doesn’t explain why we make any specific choice.
—90% of our actions are driven by unconscious motivations and that is not controlled and therefore not free.
—We are only aware of a tiny fraction of the information we absorb so we aren't making conscious choices about that.
—Neurologists have learned that we make decisions before we are consciously aware of them. If it isn’t a conscious choice it can’t be free.
—Any choice made that is not based on external factors and based on who we have become to make such a choice would be irrational.
—What will convince you to make a specific decision? You won’t know until it happens and then you become aware of it. It does the convincing TO you.