I’ve Been Thinking by Daniel C Dennett, and Free Agents by Kevin J Mitchell: From fun academic infighting to slinky human agency

Remember The Four Horsemen of Atheism? For those who fear the current culture war on “woke” has sucked the oxygen out of public debate, there may be some comfort in knowing the last culture war on religion fizzled out without civilisation collapsing.

Long before Jordan Peterson started filling concert arenas, Richard Dawkins galloped into the public consciousness as the Don Quixote of New Atheism, with Dan Dennett as his Sancho Panza (fiercely loyal to the author of The God Delusion but subtler and less antagonistic). Dennett would no doubt hate this description but since his biography is full of put-downs and point-scoring against academic competitors, along with an at times cloying degree of self-regard, it seems appropriate to open a review with some gentle slagging.

In fairness to Dennett, he admits to his foibles, recording a colleague’s observation: “Dan believes modesty is a virtue to be reserved for special occasions.” Much of his book tracks a relatively charmed path through academia but there are regular segues into such familiar topics as evolutionary biology, consciousness and critical thinking. At 81 he has lost none of his sense of wonder. The essay that opens I’ve Been Thinking is a wonderful rebuke to friends who prayed for him when he had a near-death experience in 2006. “I have resisted the temptation to respond: ‘Thanks, I appreciated it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?’”

Dennett’s view on free will is that our brain essentially makes choices for us but we can still be held morally responsible for wanting certain outcomes.

His recollections about certain “big names” of science and philosophy are refreshingly gossipy and unfiltered. Continental philosophers are teased unmercifully but no one comes out worse in the book than John Searle, who appeared to have taken Dennett’s critique of his famous “Chinese room argument” (about the nature of consciousness) very personally. It’s entertaining stuff, even if the stakes are sometimes much lower than Dennett makes out.

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One of the few points of conflict between the Four Horsemen has been on the question of free will. Sam Harris (who along with the late Christopher Hitchens completed the quartet) is a stanch determinist. Free will is an illusion, Harris insists, whereas Dennett believes in the existence of free will in a “nonmagical sense”. Taking a stance known as compatibilism, Dennett’s view is that our brain essentially makes choices for us but we can still be held morally responsible for wanting certain outcomes.

Trinity College Dublin neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell believes both are wrong, or at least neither is completely correct. In Free Agents, he goes to great lengths explaining why, thus attempting to solve a puzzle that, he notes, has perplexed thinkers “for millennia”. Whether Mitchell has succeeded is open to debate – I’m not sure who would adjudicate on such a matter – but he has written a highly original and very persuasive book.

Some of the strongest passages are where he lets the air out of overinflated claims in neuroscience. But the real meat of the book is an exploration of agency and its centrality, in Mitchell’s view, to making sense of the question of free will. “All living things have some degree of agency” but humans have evolved to have extra capabilities, including the fact that “we can think about our own thoughts”.

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Mitchell convincingly argues that determinism relies on a distorted view of human nature. Our brains are not passively waiting for external stimuli but “are constantly cycling through possible actions”. Moreover, it isn’t “a one-way relationship from environment to organism” but rather “a recursive loop of mutual interaction”. Such features are used to build up what Mitchell calls “a holistic physical conception of agency”.

While some scientists might shudder at a word like “holistic”, Mitchell is quick to respond to almost every conceivable riposte. To those who would describe his account of causation as circular – given an organism, under the holistic model, is both changing the environment and being changed by it – Mitchell replies it only “looks circular” from a single point in time. “The apparently linear chain of causation is really a loop or a series of loops – you can think of it as a spiral stretched through time.”

He encourages us to visualise a Slinky. It’s a nice twist: a beloved child’s toy that sprang down many a stairwell unlocks the secret to free will.

Mitchell’s conclusion sounds poetic but is in keeping with his “naturalistic” framework: “Living beings do not cause themselves in an instant, but they do cause themselves through time. That’s what being alive entails – continuing to cause yourself.” Carefully argued and fair-minded but forceful in its conclusions, Free Agents is interdisciplinary research at its best.