Kevin J. Mitchell > Quotes

“There is a power in accepting people the way they are—our friends, partners, workmates, children, siblings, and especially ourselves. People really are born different from each other and those differences persist. We’re shy, smart, wild, kind, anxious, impulsive, hardworking, absent-minded, quick-tempered. We literally see the world differently, think differently, and feel things differently. Some of us make our way through the world with ease, and some of us struggle to fit in or get along or keep it together. Denying those differences or constantly telling people they should change is not helpful to anyone. We should recognize the diversity of our human natures, accept it, embrace it, even celebrate it.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are

“We can think about our own thoughts, reason about our own reasons, and communicate with each other through a shared language. We can access the machine code running in our brains by translating high-level abstract concepts into causally efficacious patterns of neural activity. This gives a physical basis for how decisions are made in real time, not just as the outcome of complex physical interactions but also for consciously accessible reasons, and it provides a firm footing for the otherwise troublesome concept of mental causation.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Twin, family, and population studies have all conclusively shown that psychological traits are at least partly, and sometimes largely, heritable—that is, a sizable portion of the variation that we see in these traits across the population is attributable to genetic variation. However, as we have seen in the preceding chapters, the relationship between genes and traits is far from simple.
The fact that a given trait is heritable seems to suggest that there must be genes for that trait. But phrasing it in that way is a serious conceptual trap. It implies that genes exist that are dedicated to that function—that there are genes for intelligence or sociability or visual perception. But this risks confusing the two meanings of the word gene: one, from the study of heredity, refers to genetic variants that affect a trait; the other, from molecular biology, refers to the stretches of DNA that encode proteins with various biochemical or cellular functions.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell

“Neurons are highly specialized for the generation and conduction of electrical signals, but they communicate with each other through the release and detection of special chemicals known as neurotransmitters at specialized structures called synapses.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Exercising free will requires an open-ended ability for individuals to learn, to create new goals further and further removed from the ultimate imperatives of survival, to plan over longer timeframes, to simulate the outcomes of possible actions and internally evaluate them before acting, to decouple cognition from action, and ultimately to inspect their own reasons and subject them to metacognitive scrutiny.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Things just happen, with nobody or no thing trying to make them one way or another. Nothing has meaning or value; nothing is good or bad. But living things do try (to stay alive),”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“It’s fashionable these days to claim that “free will is an illusion!”: either it does not exist at all, or it is really not what we think it is. I am not willing to give up on it so easily. In this book I argue that we really are agents. We make decisions, we choose, we act—we are causal forces in the universe. These are the fundamental truths of our existence and absolutely the most basic phenomenology of our lives. If science seems to be suggesting otherwise, the correct response is not to throw our hands up and say, “Well, I guess everything we thought about our own existence is a laughable delusion.” It is to accept instead that there is a deep mystery to be solved and to realize that we may need to question the philosophical bedrock of our scientific approach if we are to reconcile the clear existence of choice with the apparent determinism of the physical universe.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“A lot of signaling between cells is mediated by the release of proteins or other molecules and their detection by receptors on the surface of other cells. This kind of chemical signaling is cheap, energetically speaking, and very effective for some things. But it is slow, relying on the passive diffusion of molecules, and it’s hard to direct to specific sites or target to specific cells. Multicellular organisms still do use this kind of signaling, especially for regulating physiological processes on a scale of minutes to hours.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“futures. The process relies on physical mechanisms but it’s not correct to think it can be reduced to those mechanisms. What the system is doing should not be identified with how the system is doing it. Those mechanisms collectively comprise a self, and it’s the self that decides.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Organisms evolve the means to represent sensory information internally without directly acting on it. More sophisticated control systems emerge for guiding action over longer timeframes.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“These neurons signal things like “I’m well fed” or “I’m starving” or, more generally, “internal conditions are good” or “they’re not good.” These signals affect how much attention or weight should be given to various external stimuli, tuning behavior accordingly; for example, a hungry animal will be more likely than a well-fed animal to cross a noxious chemical to get to food.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Although it is incorrect to think of evolution as a march of progress, because simpler forms continued to thrive in their own niches, it is nevertheless possible to track innovations over time that led along certain lineages to increasing complexity and, more importantly for our purposes, to more sophisticated kinds of agency.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“And then, at some point, actors emerged on this stage. Simple lifeless components were somehow assembled into forms that held themselves apart from these general happenings and instead acted on the world. Entities that do things came into existence.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will

“Biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets. Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions and not some agency that exists outside those laws … so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”
― Kevin J. Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will