I have been reviewing neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell’s book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. See Part 1 here. Once again, to keep the strands of the argument straight, I’m going in order, following the subtitle.

“Will”

We have seen how Dr. Mitchell’s book successfully defends the reality of freedom against the claim of determinism. But this doesn’t finish the job. “Free” is only half of “free will,” after all. We are not trying to talk about mere random firings of neurons in the brain. 

Mitchell acknowledges that randomness alone does not constitute free will. Rather, he argues that our brains have some “causal slack” (wiggle room, basically) caused by quantum randomness at the molecular level, and this opens the door for free will.

Okay, the door is open. But what will come through?

Mitchell makes it very clear that he is not talking about anything supernatural, “spooky,” or mystical. He is not invoking a soul. He is saying that the inherent randomness in physics and chemistry allow the physical machinery of the brain to behave and fulfill its evolutionary purpose in a not-totally-predetermined way. 

The question we have to ask, then, is “Where is the will?” 

The argument is in danger of becoming circular. Mitchell understands that the two alternatives to will are randomness and determinism — the classic “chance and necessity” favored by materialists. To those who wish to discount will in favor of determinism, Mitchell points out that the world is not strictly deterministic, according to modern physics — there is quantum randomness. To those who wish to discount will in favor of randomness, Mitchell points out that organisms do not behave in an entirely random way — our brains are pre-configured in a way that guides and limits the randomness. To those who point out that the new factors he has introduced are ultimately deterministic as well, he replies that they are not because there is also some randomness in the system…

The argument could go on forever, because Mitchell has nowhere introduced any essential element besides chance and necessity. He can’t, because a naturalistic worldview doesn’t allow anything other than chance and necessity. Yet an organism that acts according to a blend of chance and necessity isn’t what we mean when we talk about a free agent.

The Neglected Option

There is another option. You might scrap that whole paradigm. You might imagine that there is something other than chance and necessity, and that something is… well, will.

What if, skipping Descartes, we go all the back to John Duns Scotus,¹ and say that will is simply will, and nothing more can be said about it? 

I’m sure that sounds like a cop-out. But (as Duns Scotus pointed out) you must eventually make such a statement about something, or you will go on ad infinitum, providing cause after cause forever. Eventually you have to stop, at the fabric of reality — wherever that may be. Whatever the most fundamental fabric of the universe is, it cannot be defined in terms of other things — because it must itself comprise the definitions of everything else. So just as an old-school materialist might take “brute matter” or “forces” or perhaps “the laws of physics” to be irreducible starting points, those who hold a so-called “Platonic realist” view of free will maintain that “will” is fundamental type of cause — a basic building block of reality that cannot be broken down any further.  

This conclusion is derived simply from introspection: we do not feel that chance and determinism are the only ways that things can happen. We feel that there is a third basic casual type, which we embody when we act as agents. 

Most hard-nosed scientists might dismiss such evidence, but I suspect Mitchell wouldn’t: he says in the book that because the reality of free will is “the most basic phenomenology of our lives,” our direct knowledge of it should be enough to make us “question the philosophical bedrock of our scientific approach.” Well, let’s do that then. When we decide to do something, we do not feel that we are acting according to chance and necessity alone. We perceive (directly, it seems) that there is another type of causality at work. That straightforward observational evidence is why we think we have “will.”  (It’s hard to imagine how we would even be able to conceive of “will” if it wasn’t a possibility in the world to begin with.) So when Mitchell (valiantly) tries to construct a naturalistic model of will, he is drifting away from the common experience of will that motivated the whole discussion in the first place. 

A Materialist Model of Will?

If Mitchell were to read this, I suspect he would say I have missed the point, by failing to understand that will and agency can be explained in purely physicalist, yet non-reductionist, terms.  I don’t think I have missed the point — rather, I suspect that because Mitchell is starting from an assumption of materialism, his account of free will fails take into account the strength of non-materialist options, and he is left with an explanation that is only the best option in a bad paradigm. My sense is that he is hiding the true lack of “will” in his model by a sleight of hand (just as he charged the compatibilists with doing with “free”) with various explanations of will that seem in the end to explain just about everything but will. 

First, he makes much of the fact that organisms act not randomly but with purpose. But “having a purpose” is not the same as “willing.” A jack-in-the-box has a purpose, but we don’t feel its actions to be willful (the moment you did, you would call a priest). Then he tries to solve this problem by invoking the fact that organisms are Kantian Wholes existing both for and by means of themselves, and therefore have internal, rather than external purposiveness. Well, this may provide a definitionally coherent “we” for “we have free will.” But it still doesn’t provide a “will.” The same goes for his argument that choices are made over time, not merely space, and his argument that top-down causation rather than bottom-up causation guides our decision-making: it’s all true, it may even be important, but it doesn’t provide the “will” — at least, not unless you change the word to mean something other than the idea that started the debate in the first place. 

To see what I mean, imagine that someone gave you a thousand little black tiles and asked you to “arrange them in a red shape.” You would know this to be impossible, without even trying (and without being capable of imagining all the ways in which the tiles could be arranged) simply because you have a direct, experiential knowledge of “red,” and you know that it is a color, not a shape.² The same applies to will: even without knowing all the possible patterns of activity in a human brain, you know that they can never get you “will,” because will is will, not a pattern of activity. You know this not from definitional arguments, but from direct, experiential knowledge of will. 

This is the problem that keeps scientists and philosophers of the mind running in circles about whether subjective or “phenomenological” experiences can be explained in materialistic terms. You can talk all day about the neurological basis for pain, for example, but at some point (consciously or subconsciously) you have to meekly slip in, “…and then you feel pain.” Otherwise, you have stopped talking about what you were ostensibly trying to explain — you’ve drifted over to a different topic (patterns of activity in neurons, etc.). 

Mitchell is aware of this problem, the so-called “hard problem of consciousness.” He admits that you could in theory have a robot who behaved as we do and yet had nothing “going on” inside. With admirable humility, he concedes that “[a]s to how such conscious mental experiences come about, well frankly, we don’t know.” What he fails to acknowledge is that the same philosophical challenge can be applied to free will — that at some point in any scientific explanation you have to bite the bullet and say, “…and then the organism wills to do something,” or else lose touch with the experiential “will” that was the reason for the debate to begin with. Mitchell does not bite the bullet, and so his “will” ends up being something very different from the “will” of everyday usage.

As a good scientist, Mitchell dismisses all Platonist or realist models of will as “mystical” or “spooky.” Fair enough. But most people have concluded through introspection that they do in fact possess a will of this sort, and Mitchell’s account of free will is unlikely to move such people.³

A Gateway Drug                                                                              

But perhaps it wasn’t intended to. It might be unfair to expect the book to constitute a defense of materialism, just as it would have been unfair to expect a defense of Darwinism. The book is mostly concerned with settling a dispute within the broader framework of a scientific naturalism, not defending the framework itself. Still, if Mitchell is going to use arguments that seem to point to a solution outside of that framework, then of course those on the outside are going to beckon him to come out.

With that in mind, I would recommend his book as a “gateway” drug for anyone who is stuck in a reductionist-materialist paradigm. As naturalist who rejects intelligent design, Dr. Mitchell can’t be lightly dismissed. His pointed critiques of both reductionism and determinism are likely to shake all but the most entrenched materialist because, at the end of the day, he’s right: the old reductionist, determinist paradigm, which seemed to close the door to free will, simply cannot be derived from the current scientific evidence. The door is open to other causes — even those that Mitchell himself would prefer to keep out.

Notes

1. See: John Duns Scotus, “Questions on Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX, Q.15,” in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M., ed. and trans (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1986). 
2. Mitchell acknowledges this by implication when, paraphrasing Bertrand Russell, he asserts that “color doesn’t even exist in the world: it is the result of the organism creating what are essentially arbitrary categories to help distinguish objects from each other.” How can he be sure that color doesn’t exist in the outside world? Simply because light wavelengths are not colors; they are wavelengths. Yet the same could be said about a complex pattern of neurons firing in the brain — they are not themselves color, any more than a wavelength is.
3. This group, by the way, includes even some scientists who have hopped aboard the Platonic train — including, recently, Harvard/Tufts biologist Michael Levin.