The Fate of Free Will
Kevin Mitchell

Organisms struggle to maintain themselves. They strive to persist and then to reproduce. Natural selection ensures it. “The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does,” Mitchell says. “Living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing — their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value. And yet…no one would say that (a single cell organism) has will, free or otherwise.

Rejecting the reductionist view does not mean resorting to mind–body dualism—positing some extra, nonphysical entity, like a soul or a spirit. There is no ghost in this machine. “Our minds are not an extra layer sitting above our physical brains,” Mitchell says. They are the holistic sum of that continuous, dynamic, distributed activity. The brain is material, and its parts are increasingly well understood.

Free will, as distinct from agency, implies consciousness and self-reflection. Yet so much of what we do is involuntary. 

Yet unconscious decision-making is still decision-making. And sometimes we do think. We reflect, ponder, dither, weigh alternatives for some time before choosing to act.

Still, when the occasion requires, we can gather our wits, as the expression goes.

Thought involves continual feedback and self-correction, and the individual components cannot be teased apart. Mitchell writes:

The various subsystems involved are in constant dialogue with each other, each attempting to satisfy its own constraints in the context of the dynamically changing information it receives from all the interconnected areas.

Agency is what distinguishes us from machines. For biological creatures, reason and purpose come from acting in the world and experiencing the consequences.