Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

On Agency and Evolution an interview with Kevin Mitchell (Patreon)

Published:
2024-02-20 05:25:12
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

  • Kevin Mitchell Interview.mp3

Some files exceed the archive size limit and weren't saved: 1 file. Please note these limits are in place to keep this site running long term, without costing a fortune. You can favorite the creator though, certain milestones increase the limit.

Content

In this episode, Matt and Chris converse with Kevin Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Genetics and Neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin, and author of 'Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will'. 

We regret to inform you that the discussion does indeed involve discussion of philosophy-adjacent topics such as free will, determinism, consciousness, the nature of self, and agency. But do not let that put you off!  Kevin is a scientist and approaches them all through a sensible evolutionary and scientific perspective. If you ever wanted to see Matt geek out and Chris remain chill... this is the episode for you.

Links

Kevin's website

Robert Sapolsky vs Kevin Mitchell: The Biology of Free Will | Philosophical Trials #15

Kevin's TedX Talk: Who’s in charge? You or your brain? | Kevin Mitchell | TEDxTrinityCollegeDublin

Files

Comments

Lillie

Thank you🌸🌿

Emma

Oh dear. Robert Sapolsky used to be one of my favourite scientists authors. Although I have lost track of him and haven't read his newest book. In his last book 'Behave' he did mention he didn't believe in free will. But I read that he meant that in more of a social justice way rather than in a more philosophical/existential way. Maybe I missed something. But I recall he used it as an argument against the US punative justice system. Because he argued crime comes from poverty and trauma and mental illness. So it makes zero sense to punish people when their actions were not really under their control and plus the jail system seems to just train petty criminals to become more hardened criminals. I was mostly on board with that argument. It's something I ponder myself quite a lot because I have found myself with some people in my life who are very hard to handle but also very obviously mentally unwell. I think maybe to me the non free will argument makes sense because as a sort of lefty woke adjacent person myself and my friends already tend to view the world in terms of unfair privileges and unfair disadvantages. Like here in Australia the jail system is full of indigenous people. Some of that is doubtlessly police prejudice but also indigenous communities have far more drug use and crime than middle class white communities. But obviously the indigenous people are not in any way to blame for that. It's colonialism and the backward government. Not that I believe we don't have any free will at all. But I suspect life circumstances have a bigger impact than free will for most of us. Just my non expert ramblings. Maybe Robert Sapolsky would be a good subject for a future decoding? He seems to be straying out of just science and into a more political direction.

Níall

I question this guys credentials purely because it's the same institution that gave me a degree

Ymirsdreams

"I can resist everything except temptation." Oscar Wilde.

Nina Davies

The difficulty with conversations about free will and what the 'I' is that usually we are talking within very narrow definitions. Sam Harris was given extremely specific instructions in locating an 'I' and found it was not there. He has then generalised the specific missing 'I' or 'ghost in the machine' to identity in its multitude of meaning. Rumi and other mystics with a belief in God see the lack of an 'I' as evidence of God; It is not 'me' acting, it is God acting through me or in me or identically with me. This is all fine if you are living in a cave removed from society .... but a bit of an ego trip if you find yourself preaching to others in a concrete way. Dancing free of concepts in the desert does not really help with international conflict. I like very much that this conversation looked what 'I' is beyond the very narrow definition. The conversation also avoided discussing the more philosophical matter of the subjective experience of identity.

Lilydale

In his new book Sapolsky extols the Norwegian kind of prison, where the inmates get “funishment”. Go ahead and read it Emma—he’ll still be one of your favorite science writers, as he is mine!

Zack

I am ready to be very frustrated listening to this ep as free-will is my hobby horse, but still excited! If you have somehow missed it, you really should read Galen Strawson from a philosophical perspective. He puts this discussion to bed in my view, but that’s just my view. For a more universal picture, Shaun Nichols at Cornell has a great courses series (available on audible) that spans 24 lectures covering the history of the free will debate and the philosophical and scientific arguments made. But if one must go to science for a fundamentally philosophical question, you could check out Robert Sapolsky on this topic.

Paul Bowman

This was right up my alley. Particularly after the frustration of listening to Harris waffle ignorantly about the "illusion of self" (I won't even mention the lab leak and political stuff!). Not come across Kevin's work before. I will definitely put the book on the reading list. I had a moment of realisation listening to this. There are a few belief systems I've come across in my life that it's not so much that I don't buy them, but more I don't even understand how anybody could possibly believe them. One of them is Calvin's double predestination and another is the people who go around saying there's no such thing as free will and everything from the big bang is inescapably determined. Now I see the two are connected, via the lingering Cartesianism of the dominant modernist ideology. Descartes ofc believed in the clockwork universe of determinism, but defended the Catholic doctrine of free will (against Calvinist predestination + sola fide) by creating the mind-body dualism. As the default modernism moved on from deist rationalism to agnostic empiricism, the dualist domain of the soul & god disappears, leaving the bizarro-world of clockwork determinism and "no free will", despite the fact, as Kevin pointed out at the start, it simply doesn't compute even in basic physics, so it's scientifically baseless. And any sustained, scientifically baseless belief has to be ideological, pretty much by design. And if it's lasting and widespread it must be related to the default doxa, rather than specific doctrinal systems. The "New Atheist" determinists like Dennett et al, are basically Cartesian atheists. Luckily other atheisms are available!

Gustaf Pihl

I don't quite understand Kevin's big bang information argument against determinism. It seems like a basic point for anyone with some experience in computer science or physics that you don't need to store the entire future state of a system in order to generate it. You can write a 20 line or so program that visualizes the Mandlebrot set with its infinite complexity. This program does not have every pixel color of the fractal stored for infinite zoom levels, but upon request they can be calculated from a simple recursion. Another example would be to setup a simple cellular automata that generates novel patterns infinitely. Even just generating the digits of pi ad infinitum with a simple program makes the same point. These examples are all entirely deterministic and the result of letting them run indefinitely is that they will generate an infinite amount of data. However the information required in the initial state is very limited. I mean one of the main appeals with stipulating physical laws is that they capture and explain so much complexity in the world using so little information. It also felt like there was no real intuition or explanation for how the idea of "top-down" causation is supposed to work, or what should motivate us to take it seriously, more than that it kind of feels right? I got the impression throughout that there may be some wishful thinking on the part of Kevin, and bits of information from different fields that may or may not hold up upon scrutiny or produce a coherent argument. I am personally agnostic about free-will, the function of consciousness, determinism and so on, but wasn't quite sold on this take on the matter. Thanks for the episode none the less!

Empty_Cognizance

Just out of curiosity, does this have a video coming later? If so, they just generally tend to feel like more of a “complete” experience and I'd just wait so I'm not hearing the same thing twice. Either way, thanks for cool stuff like this 😄

Linda Sears

I wish I understood quantum mechanics better since it appears that Mitchell’s argument about causal slack derives from indeterminacy and/or the probabilistic nature of reality at the quantum level. From my small bit of understanding, quantum mechanics might be deterministic as well, but we don’t know enough yet. However, if quantum mechanics is probabilistic and not deterministic, that is not the same thing as being completely random, which makes wonder how much causal slack there is.

Trees

I'm with Matt, I'm not sure "is there freewill" is a well-formed, meaningful question. The overlap between Kevin's ideas and sense makers is more than superficial. Or at least the overlap with John Vervaeke (who is the only one I've ever followed at length). For example, the way he defines living things as being patterns that persist themselves through time is similar to Vervaeke's autopoiesis. The example about fonts and text is something Vervaeke calls framing, I think.  He even ventures into meta cognition as a solution to attention management by organisms, which touches on Vervaeke's trademark relevance realization. Kevin even says "we need a good science of meaning", which is 100% sense maker. Oh and the part about physical reality shaping our language is definitely covered in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It's been a couple years since I listened to those lectures. Maybe my memories are too indistinct so it's easier to equivocate, but I was getting strong Vervaeke vibes. Just cooler, with a better accent, no Greek and no fondness for hanging out with big JP and little JP.

Alex H

This is my favourite non-guru DtG episode so far. That we're a system with various points of agency operating at different degrees makes sense to me. Most of us don't suddenly worry we lack free will we drive a known route mindlessly. We get that mulling over what to make for dinner is a better use of scarce attentional resources! My greater self-concept doesn't collapse if I see my thoughts emerge unbidden while meditating either. Does it trouble a CEO if he isn't the author of the ideas raised at a meeting or even thay he won't be personally implementing them, so long as he can call the meeting and make key decisions?

Christopher McLaughlin

Matt seriously blew my mind this episode! I’ve been listening to philosophers and neuroscientists and physicists debate free will, and to a lesser degree the self, for years and years. When Matt suggested that maybe those are shit questions my intuition fought it at first. But I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe Matt is right and the more and more I thought about it the clearer it became that he was definitely right! It’s shit because the correct answer to this debate lies completely in how we define “free will” or “the self”. The philosopher we should be looking to is not Dan Dennett, it’s Karl Popper. It seems to me neither free will nor determinism is falsifiable, meaning they’re both non-scientific. As far as the self, even in Buddhism the self is considered a “conventional" or "provisional" truth, while non-self is an “ultimate" truth. As far as I can tell the existence of the self comes down solely to how you define it. They’re both shit questions. Matt you’re a fucking genius mate!

Lilydale

This was great! I read Kevin’s book, and I really was excited you were going to interview him. His first book, “Innate” is free on Audible! At first I couldn’t understand his point and thought Sapolsky was altogether right, but after reading his books and listening to lots of his podcast interviews I began to understand what he was getting at when he said Sapolsky was a closet duelist, and then I realized I was too!

collapsing

Really good episode. And he completely does sound Norn Irish….even after he explained. I wonder if he and Sam Harris meet in person will they mysteriously physically cancel each other out given this seemed to be the opposite of that interview. Do still think there’s the free will / moral responsibility/ guilt question that perhaps but separate and Sapolsky alludes to about decision making. Even if we quibble about terms the ‘system’ /self doing the ‘thing’ , by the time we accept legal responsibility age (12/16/18/21) has already been long set in motion by factors completely outwith its control- genetics/ in utero/environment etc. so that idea of ‘ the system /self’ at that specific time really having significant choice seems silly other than serving a societal/ deterrent function and probably throwback to good/evil simplicity of Religion… But as Dennet says- The ‘Truth’??, people can’t handle the Truth!!!’ ( or might have been Jack Nicholson)

Linda Sears

I enjoyed the second part better. I agree with Mitchell about what understanding is. I also agree with him that creativity requires a living agent, but this may change, depending on what one means by the term creativity. It seems to me that what we term “free will” becomes more salient at higher levels of consciousness. I could imagine that the amount of complexity that a living system has gives it more options, and the ability to think through those options could provide a better outcome. My tendency is to think that some people have more “free will” or agency than others. A person with an intellectual disability that severely limits them from, for example, going to college and becoming an biologist has fewer options and opportunities, and a person with Alzheimer’s does not have the memory/mental capacity to make meaningful cognitive maps of their realty that help them negotiate the world successfully. People who are living under repressive regimes also have limited agency. A just world for me is one where more humans have more opportunities and the necessary resources they need to help them so that their agency is expanded. This is one reason why I think education is so important. I think a lot of this debate comes down to what one means by free will.

Christy Kilgore

“Gradient of Anus, the Decoding the Gurus Story” 😂

Gustaf Pihl

I was surprised by Kevin's expressed thoughts regarding AI. If memory serves he gave a brief explanation of what overfitting is and how the current AI models lack it. Overfitting, along with a compression of the training data achieved by extracting general concepts from it. He quite confidently said he thinks that these concepts are what we mostly mean when we say something has understanding, and that we are far from achieving anything like this in AI. Now I know that he gave the caveat of not being an expert on this before opining on it, but.. The whole field of machine learning exists and works because we are able to create models that avoid overfitting and do actually compress the training data. Most of the little theory there is in the area is specifically about techniques for measuring and reducing overfitting, like test/train/val splitting, regularization, having a good data to parameter count ratio, VC dimension and so on. When it comes to the compression aspect, take something like Stable Diffusion. The models are on the order of 4GB, whereas the training dataset is on the order of tens of TB. The compression ratio is on the order of 1000x - 10000x. Although the compression is lossy, the amount of concepts these models seem to gain some level of visual understanding of is the whole reason these are so impressive. If neural networks were not able to prevent overfitting or generalize concepts, we might as well just be doing simple interpolation over the training data, right? Now as to what we make of this, how we define understanding, of course that is a rather arbitrary and subjective thing. I just wanted to add my 2 cents on the more technical aspects as I feel it could be quite consequential in getting a good prediction of how far along we are and what these models are doing inside. It can be quite frustrating following the AI debate with everyone expressing very strong opinions about what is going on in the models even when they don't have much experience or knowledge in the area.

Jesse Rimler

I'm halfway through but I just want to say that this is a fabulous interview! I love your questions and how Mitchell threads the needle between the extreme views. By contrast, Sapolsky has been very stubborn (Harris-ian?) and pedantic on this topic, which is a shame!

Arbo

"You don't want to be one with the universe." 👍😃