At Nautilus, science writer Dan Falk profiles the authors of two recent books on the topic of free will, with a basic statement of the position of each.

On the No Free Will side is primatologist and Stanford professor of neurology, Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin 2023).

On the Yes Free Will side in Trinity College neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton University Press, 2023).

New approach or new openness?

Back around the turn of the millennium, many might have doubted that the controversy would still be alive. Surely, by 2023, when Falk wrote this essay, “science” would have disproved free will. The fact that nothing of the sort has happened is itself mute testimony to a slow move in science away from physicalism — the view that everything is subject to the laws of physics.

In this essay, which Nautilus has sent round again, Falk describes the new mood as “a volley of new insights” that “reignites the debate over whether our choices are ever truly our own.” Some of the insights may be new. But, more generally, many thoughtful people are now more willing to entertain the idea that physicalism may not be a correct interpretation of reality.

Invoking physics to deny free will

The “laws of physics” approach is a critical part of Sapolsky’s argument:

To most people, Sapolsky said, free will is apparent in real time, for every action you perform. “You ask, ‘Did you intend to do it? Did you realize you could have done something else? That you had options?’ Most people’s intuitive sense is the answers are yes, and so you have demonstrated free will. But that’s like trying to evaluate a movie by only seeing the last three minutes of it. When you ask, ‘Where did intent come from?’, everything from one second to a million years before comes into play. That leads inevitably to the conclusion that there’s no free will. Because no matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”

The way Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

“Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not,” November 2, 2023

Invoking evolution to establish free will

His literary opponent, Kevin Mitchell, parts company with evolution heavyweights like Jerry Coyne who denies free will and Richard Dawkins and Larry Krauss who waffle about it. He attempts to use evolutionary theory to make a case for how free will emerges:

But emerge it does, according to Mitchell, and he’s adamant that there is nothing miraculous about it. Rather, in living creatures like us, freedom is enabled by the underlying biology…

For Mitchell, decision-making did not start with human beings. Rather, it can be traced back to the first simple organisms that flourished hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago. “I wanted to take an evolutionary approach to this problem,” he said.

Evolution, Mitchell said, favors organisms that have some ability to make their way in the world. “They need to know what’s out in the world, and what to do about it.” Creatures evolved the ability to sense, and the ability to act, based on those sensations. They were evaluating (in some primitive manner) which action was likely to prolong their survival. “Even bacteria do this,” Mitchell said. Humans merely do this in a more sophisticated manner.

“We see what’s out in the world, gauge our internal state—bacteria do that too—and, given those things, given my beliefs about the world, and my own state at the moment, and my goals, we ask, ‘What should I do? What’s my range of options? How can I choose one of them and inhibit all the others?’”

Over the course of evolution, creatures with more sophisticated decision-making abilities appeared. “Yes, We Have Free Will.”

It’s significant that Mitchell is using evolution to establish free will. Most uses of the concept of evolution would be to deny or diminish it, as in “We evolved to be unfaithful,” “We evolved to be violent,” etc.

Granting Mitchell’s position, a bacterium’s “decision” to eat rather than self-destruct is still not really equivalent to the classic ethical problem of whether to, say, tell a lie under oath to save a life. The bacterium’s behavior may indeed be programmed; the free will debate rages around the human’s behavior.

There is, of course, a way out

Whether or not Mitchell is himself a panpsychist, his basic argument is easier to credit if we assume panpsychism (everything is conscious), along the lines of, say, Hedda Hassel Mørch or cosmopsychism (the universe is conscious), along the lines of Annaka Harris.

In a panpsychist or cosmopsychist framework, neither decision is necessarily programmed in a mechanical way but the human’s decisions are almost infinitely more complex.

The fact that this debate still rages shows that eliminative materialism and physicalism are experiencing setbacks in our philosophy of science culture today.