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Free Agents
- How Evolution Gave Us Free Will
- Narrated by: Kevin J. Mitchell
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's summary
This audiobook narrated by neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents an evolutionary case for the existence of free will.
Scientists are learning more and more about how brain activity controls behavior and how neural circuits weigh alternatives and initiate actions. As we probe ever deeper into the mechanics of decision making, many conclude that agency—or free will—is an illusion. In Free Agents, leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell presents a wealth of evidence to the contrary, arguing that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.
Traversing billions of years of evolution, Mitchell tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice emerged from lifeless matter. He explains how the emergence of nervous systems provided a means to learn about the world, granting sentient animals the capacity to model, predict, and simulate. Mitchell reveals how these faculties reached their peak in humans with our abilities to imagine and to be introspective, to reason in the moment, and to shape our possible futures through the exercise of our individual agency. Mitchell’s argument has important implications—for how we understand decision making, for how our individual agency can be enhanced or infringed, for how we think about collective agency in the face of global crises, and for how we consider the limitations and future of artificial intelligence.
An astonishing journey of discovery, Free Agents offers a new framework for understanding how, across a billion years of Earth history, life evolved the power to choose and why this matters.
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From launchpad explosions to a pernicious cricket infestation to the demanding management style of Musk himself, the rise of SpaceX was beset with challenges and far from inevitable. Find out how the startup beat the odds and flew high enough to outpace their rivals... and where they're going next.
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Appreciated the engineering details
- By Will on 10-19-24
By: Eric Berger
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Cosmic Queries
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- Length: 6 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating audiobook, Tyson and coauthor James Trefil, a renowned physicist and science popularizer, take on the big questions that humanity has been posing for millennia - How did life begin? What is our place in the universe? Are we alone? - and provide answers based on the most current data, observations, and theories.
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Not worth it
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Naked Statistics
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- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins
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From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.
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Starts well then becomes non-Audible
- By Michael on 09-07-13
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Inspired
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- By: Marty Cagan
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How do today's most successful tech companies - Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla - design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently from the vast majority of tech companies. In Inspired, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides listeners with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love.
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Great book, terrible audio wanted to ask a refund
- By Srikanth Ramanujam on 11-15-18
By: Marty Cagan
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Storytelling with Data
- A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
- By: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
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- Length: 5 hrs and 43 mins
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Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory but made accessible through numerous real-world examples - ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation.
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Very insightful and actionable
- By Amazon Customer on 04-27-18
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What listeners say about Free Agents
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dean Lyon
- 03-26-24
Makes sense
I really enjoyed this book and very glad it was written. I recently read Determined, a book arguing that we have no free will. This book provides an eloquent and substantive counterpoint, and rings much more true, in my opinion. I really like how grounded in evolution it is, as nothing in biology makes sense without it. I am interested in reading everything this author has written as his thinking and writing is clear and his thoughts deep.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-07-24
I chose to listen to this breath of fresh air
Very thoughtful defense of free will. As a software engineer, I look forward to using the book as a bluepint for Skynet.
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- Donna
- 08-19-24
Excellent non religious explication
A thorough exploration from chemistry, to cells to organisms. The accounting for indeterminacy, causation, memory, and choice is very helpful.
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- Jacob S.
- 04-10-24
The best treatment of Free Will available today.
This book is an evolution of the long-held discussion of Free Will and Determinism. Firstly, as someone who enjoys science, this was a joy to read. "The story of Free Will is the story of Life" states the author, and beautifully moves through the related history of both.
If you've read Sapolsky or Dennet or Harris on free will, this will be an excellent rebuttal. If you've had a sense that they were missing something key about the nature of free will, this is a fleshed-out answer to their ignorance.
Dr. Mitchell puts muscle and bone to a framework that successfully synapses a hopeful response to a seemingly mechanistic universe. He does so with scientific rigor that is also free of unnecessary superstition or mysticism. This book is a triumph of thought and scholarship.
I'm grateful to have found this read, and for the author's courage and talent in bringing it to being. You will be too.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Brad Caldwell
- 10-10-23
Adding Clarity to Agency
Agency is one of those topics that has proved nebulous and therefore prone to unrealistic simplifications like Cartesian Dualism (the self is a ghost steering neural activity separate from the brain) or reduction (you have no agency).
After listening to his audiobook, my takeaway is this: life is the structuring of an organism to take actions that preserve it. And for more complex life, we are structured to have a whole hierarchy of modifiable goals to drive behavior.
Decisions often take time, as we contemplate scenarios, payoff, and risks.
Planets have no agency - they succumb to the laws of physics. Life has agency because it has built into itself the use of the laws of physics to obey goals that it sets in place, and which can be refined by the experience within a lifetime.
I like his double reference to agency being like a helix or slinky through time - the agent's actions updating the environment which updates the agent's next move, etc. I like this because my own idea is that the perceptual spacetime in which stimuli are depicted to the 'self' network is drawn or referenced by a 'helix' tracing (for traveling/staggered unified brain activity; or 'frames' for standing waves of unified brain activity).
There are a ton of excellent ideas in this book, including the idea that primary cortices may serve two functions simultaneously (one, process the incoming stimuli; two, hold onto current context of consciousness and link it to incoming stimuli as needed/desired).
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- quinet
- 01-08-24
Best book out there on many topics
Terrific detailed and well-supported explanation of how living creatures evolve agency - and much more
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- Istvan
- 05-11-24
Best argument against the free will.
I listened to this book to find the best arguments for having free will. I started out convinced that we do not have it and that because of that fact you should show compassion to everyone because their actions can not be helped. After the book I am even more convinced of this. Although the author will strongly disagree with me. I find his structured layout of evolution, is a very good reason to not fault anyone for their "choices" because it all depends on previous experience.
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-13-24
Unconvincing, but worthwhile
The first few chapters of this book are quite weak. The author analyzes early life forms, which is not really necessary to his main thesis, and then jumps into quantum mechanics to claim the universe is not fully determined. Even if true, quantum events are limited to the microscale, so they have little to do with macroscopic creatures like us deciding anything.
From there, the author goes to noise in the brain (which, again, has no apparent connection to quantum mechanics and is therefore fully determined) to describe how the brain makes decisions. That is the very strong part of the book. It is also clearly the author's specialty and I wish he would have stuck closer to it.
The main idea comes down to William James' notion of "two stage" free will. That can be summarized as, "thoughts come to us freely, decisions flow from us willfully." In other words, the "freedom" in free will lies in the choices that appear to us (which is based on our life histories as well as noisy events in the brain), while decisions stem from a "competition" between neurons that depends on our goals and expected values. I found this thesis very convincing, even if it does not refute determinism in any way.
Overall, I recommend the book for the central idea, which is genuinely insightful, even if surrounded by unconvincing material.
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- Seth K
- 04-10-24
wants his cake
so his basic argument is dualism is absurd - free will must emerg from the physical systems we comprise. but a complex physical system can be more than the sum of its parts so we can be confident "we" exert free will from some kind of top down structural influence which he calls "meaning". what? no support or explanation for what that mechanism is.
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- Tom
- 07-19-24
A strong case is made.
I particularly liked his refutations of the arguments against Free Will in the choices Humans make. The cases of those who would reduce us to Robots enslaved to a life of biologically or genetically pre-determined actions are effectively dismantled in the later chapters.
While he does occasionally drag us into the weeds of Evolution, for the most part Mitchell has created arguments that can be easily followed by the Layman. Four Stars. ****
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