playnext.fm

EconTalk · Russ Roberts

Free Will Is Real (with Kevin Mitchell)

December 15, 2025·1 hr 32 min·5 clips
Mitchell reveals how neuroscientists can remote-control animal decisions, forcing us to ask if we're just machines driven by our parts.
The question is ancient. Roberts brings Mitchell's Free Agents into the old fight with determinism, but the conversation starts small and stays there for a while. Mitchell looks at living systems that have to keep themselves together while dealing with competing goals, limits, and changing conditions. That is where the bacterium matters. When a receptor binds sugar, he does not treat it as just matter bumping matter. It is a signal, and the signal changes what the organism does next. Roberts keeps testing that move. He reaches for economics, including bounded rationality, local maxima, and the mess of optimizing across different timescales. The result is not a grand verdict. Mitchell is not saying bacteria sit around weighing reasons. He is saying agency starts before human self-consciousness. Purpose builds up slowly. Meaning and value belong to systems that act to keep going. Roberts presses on mechanism and predictability: if the parts can be described, is that the whole story? Mitchell's answer is layered. Simple life already acts on information. Humans add awareness of goals, reasons, and their own mental setup. By the end, knowing yourself sounds less like a slogan and more like a practical advantage for organized, living minds.

As heard by us

Kevin Mitchell makes a biological case for free will that begins with bacteria and ends with self-knowledge.

Kevin Mitchell comes to EconTalk with a stripped-back argument: free will is real, evolved rather than mystical, and traceable to the moment organisms first learned to act for their own persistence.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Mitchell's argument that free will starts with bacteria is harder to dismiss than you'd expect.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on
Apple PodcastsSpotify
Play clips from this episodeMore from EconTalk