Kevin Mitchell's book "Free Agents, How Evolution Gave Us Free Will" challenges the mainstream neuroscientific and philosophical position that free will is an illusion.

A central property of living things is agency, the ability to actively do things, which distinguishes them from inanimate objects like rocks or electrons.

The invention of the cell membrane was a key evolutionary step that created an entity causally insulated from the external world, establishing an inside and an outside.

The future is not predetermined by low-level physics and is genuinely open.

The human brain contains systems that can modulate the degree of randomness in generating new ideas, allowing for more creative, "outside the box" problem-solving.

Even primitive organisms like single-cell bacteria can be considered to have a minimal form of agency.

The evolution of metacognition (thinking about thoughts) in humans provides a level of conscious, rational control over behavior that is unique in the biological world.

According to the theory of "Cognitive Realism," cognition is not an epiphenomenon; the firing of neurons has causal power in a system only because of what those patterns mean.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a statement about the nature of a particle itself, not just our knowledge of it, meaning a particle cannot simultaneously have infinitely precise position and m...

At a molecular level, neurons are noisy components due to probabilistic events such as ion channels opening spontaneously or variations in neurotransmitter release.

Variations in human behaviors and personalities are largely due to differences in how their brains develop.

William James proposed a two-stage model of free will where the first stage involves the spontaneous occurrence of ideas, and the second stage involves a conscious selection among them.

Evolution acts more as an explorer than an inventor, discovering and selecting for organizations of components that possess abstract, pre-existing functionalities like oscillators or filters.

Indeterminacy at the lowest physical levels is a necessary prerequisite for any form of agency to exist.

The higher-level meaning of neural activity patterns, rather than the low-level details of individual neuron firings, is what holds causal power in the brain.

Evolution resulted in living organisms that have a goal, which is to persist.

Philosopher Daniel Dennett's view, known as compatibilism, argues for a version of free will that is sufficient to protect notions of moral responsibility.

All living cells generate internal energy stores by using a proton (hydrogen ion) gradient to power a protein that functions like a hydroelectric dam.