Kevin Mitchell on Free Will

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Author: Yascha Mounk
Full Title: Kevin Mitchell on Free Will
Category: #articles

Highlights

And it turns out that actually that’s what being a living thing is all about—making things happen. That’s almost the definition of life: living things have causal power as holistic entities. It’s not the power of any of their parts. It’s the power of the whole thing to make things happen in the world. Generally what they’re making happen is themselves. They’re making themselves happen. That’s how they keep on living. Even a simple bacterium is constantly working against the laws of thermodynamics that say all of its parts should go into equilibrium with the universe and it’s taking in energy and working to make sure that it doesn’t.
Mitchell: I liked the way that you phrased it at the end there, because the way that you phrase it is completely uncontroversial. It’s absolutely true that those decisions are influenced by things that are not under as much control as you thought, potentially, if you thought you were in complete control and weren’t constrained at all by prior influences. But that’s a really, really far cry from saying no one has any control whatsoever at any moment. You’re going from, I had less free will than I thought I had to everyone has zero free will. Those are just two extremely different propositions. And I don’t think that the more extreme version is defensible while the less extreme version is kind of obvious in the sense that everyone agrees that we have these influences on our behavior. They just have different views of what that means for things like our own kind of meta-control. And this is where metacognition and introspection come in and the question of the emergence of character, because you could say we all have personality predispositions, which is absolutely true—shaping our psychology in broad patterns like how outgoing you are, how conscientious, how neurotic, whatever, is very different from saying those predispositions determine precisely what you’re going to do in every exact moment. They don’t have enough information to do that. Instead, they inform the emergence of our character through time, the way that we adapt to the world. I’ve had sets of experiences and I’ve adapted them to them in my way. Someone else might have adapted to them in their way and that’s fine. That’s just how we come to be in the world.