DEEP DIVE | How Evolution Built Agency, Free Will and Brain (Restricted Knowledge)

26/10/2025 38 min
DEEP DIVE | How Evolution Built Agency, Free Will and Brain (Restricted Knowledge)

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We live with a paradox. Every day, we experience ourselves as authors of our own lives, making conscious choices that shape our futures. Yet, for over a century, a dominant scientific narrative has suggested this feeling is an illusion. We are, in this view, biological machines—complex collections of molecules governed by the deterministic laws of physics, with every action necessitated by prior causes. Our sense of freedom is just a story our brains tell themselves after the fact.
But what if that narrative is built on an outdated and incomplete picture of science? Neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell, in his book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, presents a powerful counter-argument. He contends that free will is not a ghost in the machine but a real, evolved biological property. Mitchell’s work aims to dismantle the simplistic deterministic worldview and ground our capacity for choice firmly within a modern, naturalistic scientific framework.



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