Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe

Dr Kevin J. Mitchell is a philosophy-friendly neuroscientist and geneticist who will present a guest seminar for the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science.

Dr Kevin Mitchell from Trinity College Dublin, whose recent book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton, 2023) is to present a guest seminar for PRHS. Entitled “Free Will in an Indeterministic Universe” the seminar will take place on campus at 5pm in the Botany House seminar room.

Of the seminar Kevin Writes:

“Much of the free will debate takes the idea of a deterministic universe as its starting premise, presenting arguments for why free will would be either possible or impossible under such conditions. This leads to either free will skepticism, which suggests that the basic phenomenology of our lives is an illusion, or to compatibilism, which constructs a defense of moral responsibility without real choice. In this talk, I will argue that there is no reason to accept this framing. There is no good evidence that physical determinism (of any variety) provides an accurate description of our universe and lots of evidence against such a view. On the contrary, the universe is characterised by a pervasive indefiniteness and a truly open future, where events are under-determined by low-level physics and many things could happen. Under this view, we do not need to ask where the freedom comes from – it comes for free. Instead, we must ask: where does the control come from? How can a human being – or any organism – come to be a locus of causal power, as a holistic self, and not just as a site of complicated happenings? The answer is that low-level under-determination creates causal slack in the system, allowing macroscopic organisation to causally constrain what happens. When subjected to selection, this leads to the emergence of systems – living organisms – that are both loci of concern and loci of causation. I will sketch an evolutionary account, detailed in my recent book Free Agents, that charts the rise of agency and behavioural control, ultimately leading to the suite of cognitive and metacognitive capacities in humans that we recognise as free will.

For further information please contact Professor Gregory Radick by email G.M.Radick@leeds.ac.uk