MAIN IDEA:

This book is about a very popular current discussion about whether the world is deterministic and humans, therefore, have no free will or whether something still allows them to exercise it. The author rejects both religious and purely mechanistic approaches, and here is how he defines his approach:

 “…basic laws of physics that deal only with energy and matter and fundamental forces cannot explain what life is or its defining property: living organisms do things, for reasons, as causal agents in their own right. They are driven not by energy but by information. And the meaning of that information is embodied in the structure of the system itself, based on its history. In short, there are fundamentally distinct types of causation at play in living organisms by virtue of their organization.

My goal in this book is to explore how living things come to have this ability to choose, to autonomously control their own behavior, to act as causes in the world. The key to this effort, in my view, is to take an evolutionary perspective. If we want to understand how choice and free will could exist in a physical universe, let’s look at the details of how they actually came to exist. The book therefore tracks how agency evolved—from the origin of life itself, through the invention of nervous systems, the subsequent elaboration of decision-making and action selection systems, and the eventual emergence of the kind of conscious cognitive control in humans that we refer to as “free will.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

Somehow, the intensity of the discussion about free will puzzles me. For me, it just does not matter whether human actions are predetermined at the initiation of the universe or not. In either case, acting individuals should be held responsible for the consequences of their actions because responsibility should be not about the past but about the future. It means that if an individual commits some action that is considered not acceptable, like murder, the one and only way to make sure that this individual will never do it again is to eliminate this individual. Our society’s biggest problem is the disconnect between actions and consequences, meaning that some people commit actions, but others have their well-being compromised as a result. I think it is not that impossible to create such a link when we have a huge capacity for information processing. For example, many people who support increasing the gas price by additional taxation feel no difference between $2/gallon and $5/gallon. I am pretty sure that if instead of the same price for everybody, the gas tax would be linked to income, resulting in somebody making twice the average income paying double the price for gas, then the number of people supporting saving the planet would go down.  I see no problem with a person making $50k a year paying $2 while a person making $500k paying $20. By the way, it would nicely demonstrate to what extent cosmic forces predetermine support for such measures, or this support could be manipulated by the free will of people who do not want to pay too much. Overall, I find the deterministic idea not necessarily wrong but just meaningless because it is impossible to falsify. It is also an impediment to any action because there is no action if there is no will to act.