The evolution of free will - with Kevin Mitchell

Do we have free will? And how does brain activity prove or deny this? Join leading neuroscientist Kevin Mitchell as he argues that we are not mere machines responding to physical forces but agents acting with purpose.

Watch the Q&A here (exclusively for channel members):    • Q&A: The evolution of free will - wit...  
Buy Kevin's book here: https://geni.us/dkj9

Traversing billions of years of evolution, Kevin tells the remarkable story of how living beings capable of choice arose 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. Discover 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.

Kevin’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.

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Kevin Mitchell is an Associate Professor in the Smurfit Institute of Genetics in Trinity College Dublin and a member of the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience. He is a graduate of the Genetics Department, Trinity College Dublin (B.A., Mod. 1991) and received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley (1997), where he studied neural development with Prof. Corey Goodman. He did postdoctoral research with Prof. Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Prof. Bill Skarnes at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, using molecular genetics to study neural development in the mouse. Since 2002 he has been on the faculty at Trinity College Dublin. He has also been an EMBO Young Investigator and was elected to Fellowship of Trinity College in 2009.

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