EAN: 9780691226231

FREE AGENTS - KEVIN J MITCHELL GEBUNDEN

Scientists are learning more and more details of how patterns of brain activity control
behaviour  how animals - including humans - make decisions  how neural circuits accumulate
evidence  weigh alternatives  and instigate actions. But as that decision-making machinery is
being revealed  it seems harder to escape the conclusion that we really are just machines.
Indeed  according to Mitchell it is fashionable among many scientists to declare that we do not
in fact have free will - that there is no way that we could. In this book  Mitchell argues
against this notion  instead contending that we really are agents: we make decisions  we choose
we act - we are causal forces in the universe. But Michell's goal here is not merely to lob
another bomb into the free will debate  it is to show how  over billiions of years  life
actually evolved the power to choose. Mitchell traces how agency evolved from the origin of
life and the invention of nervous systems to the elaboration of decision-making and the
eventual emergence of the kind of conscious cognitive control in humans that we call free will.
As Mitchell shows  over billions of years life evolved the power to choose  and this view is
very much compatible with the laws of physics and new scientific discoveries. What emerges from
this book is a new framework for understanding agency. This has important implications for how
we think of who we are as humans  how we understand our decision-making processes  how our
individual agency can be enhanced or infringed  and how we think about collective agency 
particularly in light of global scale crises. More fundamentally  we see how the story of
agency is the story of life itself--

Aktuelle Preise zur EAN 9780691226231

Produktinformationen zur 9780691226231