Free Agents summary

In the classic Monty Python "Dead Parrot" sketch, John Cleese insists to a shopkeeper that a clearly lifeless parrot is dead, while the shopkeeper vehemently claims it’s still alive. It's a hilarious scene that hints at a more profound point: The boundary between life and non-life isn't always crystal clear. 

Physicists define life as an ongoing process of maintaining order and activity, pushing back against the forces of entropy, which, broadly speaking, means disorder. Just think about rocks. Rocks can endure almost indefinitely in an inert state because they don't react with the environment. But living organisms must constantly work to uphold their highly organized physical structures amid the chaos and decay surrounding them. This continuous battle against increasing disorder demands a steady influx of energy, managed through the metabolic process of breaking down nutrients.

Organisms aren't merely spectators in their environments; they're dynamic players, sometimes outpacing the slow march of evolutionary adaptation. Take a bacterial population boom, for example – it can deplete available nutrients faster than evolutionary forces can adapt. But how did organisms evolve into such active agents, working in their own interests to overcome environmental obstacles? 

Even in the realm of simple unicellular organisms, there's a hint of agency. Consider yeast adjusting its metabolism based on environmental oxygen levels. This responsiveness points to a basic form of agency. Sensing the environment is a crucial part of this responsiveness, and over time, organisms evolved various sensors for light, vibration, chemical signatures, and more. All these sensory tools and behavioral flexibility were in service of the fundamental imperative: survival.

In the evolutionary saga, the first neurons likely emerged in eukaryotic organisms. Their job was to coordinate sensation, motion, and interactions with the environment across groups of cells. Specialized neurons entered the scene, transmitting signals that allowed multicellular life to function as a unified whole. Picture it like this: light-sensing cells sending data to central processing networks, which then send commands to muscle control cells.

Now, while quick reflexes to threats are essential for survival, there's a twist. Enter mediating neurons. These neurons slow down reactions, allowing for the integration of more perceptual data, and enabling more considered actions. Instead of reacting to each sensory input in isolation, organisms take a step back and examine the whole scenario.

Basic agency, or doing stuff based on what you see and feel, is all about perceiving the world and responding accordingly. But for more sophisticated beings like us, there’s an extra secret sauce: a sense of self across time and space.

As evolution did its thing, we upgraded our visual systems with camera-style eyes and added auditory structures like eardrums to the mix. This gave us a richer scope of what was happening around us. But just having raw data wasn’t enough. We needed to actively interpret it to make sense of the world. Take vision, for example. It's not just about seeing light patterns; it's about translating those patterns into shapes, objects, and motion. And where does all this magic happen? In our neocortex, the brain's problem-solving headquarters.

Quantum physics throws a curveball at physical predeterminism – the idea that there's only one timeline. It introduces intrinsic uncertainties, challenging the notion of a strictly predefined future. You’re likely aware of Schrödinger's cat. The moral of that story is that many or all states exist until the point at which they are measured, or the point of decision making. Then they collapse into a single reality.

This means that if we were to look at a picture of the future, it wouldn’t be a line or a series of optional lines, but rather a blurred image that gets blurrier the further out you look. Essentially, the only time that a future is knowable or clear is after a decision has been made.

Even if we accept that we have some measure of conscious free will, that doesn’t mean we control everything. Nature and nurture constrain many aspects of our wants and personality. Genetics and neurobiology shape our innate dispositions while our upbringing molds our habits and beliefs. So do we have a choice in who we are as individuals? To answer that, we need to understand personality and character. 

Personality refers to emotional patterns, social style, motivations and other facets that persist across external and internal contexts. Character means virtues, principles, and priorities that guide our behavior. Both have biological and cultural roots.