Recent research, including neurological experiments, has again raised the problem of individual agency and its opposition to strong causality. To summarize: DNA plays a very strong part in determining a wide variety of traits, including intellectual and emotional traits. The rest is determined by environmental influences, primarily peers. All of this shapes the neural connections and activity in the brain. Neural activity needed to implement a decision begins as much as a half second before the individual is aware of making the decision. This has been interpreted as evidence that the experience of deciding to do something (in this example, push a button) is an illusion, consistent with the view that actions are fully caused by the activity of neurons, in turn shaped and fully caused by DNA interacting with life experiences. This is all consistent with a philosophical position of strong determinism – after the causal effects of all the “external” factors have been accounted for, there is nothing left for the “person” to “decide.” A person holding a gun encounters an unexpected stranger: He does not decide whether to shoot the stranger or not; the outcome (shoot him or welcome him in) is fully determined by the interactions of neurons, themselves fully “programmed” by DNA + accumulated experience. Agency, the ability to decide on a course of action and the potential to be held accountable (morally or otherwise) for the results, is an illusion. The individual actually has no agency because even the most trivial action is fully caused by the inherited DNA and its history of interactions with the biological, physical, and social environment. I believe that the arguments supporting this “strong causal” view all lead to paradox – and some are based on self-contradictory assumptions. The most common error, even among writers who vehemently reject the idea of a “soul-stuff” independent of the material brain, or a “man inside” (“homunculus”), is to allow the homunculus to sneak back in. Searle’s “Chinese Room” thought experiment provides an excellent example: He posits an intelligence who receives strings of Chinese characters, looks them up in a code-book that provides responses to each string (early AI was a lot like this). Searle uses this as an argument against strong materialism in many of his early writings, never seeming to understand that he has smuggled the homunculus back into the room. The person is the “room,” the interaction among all the body’s neural systems, which includes perception and memory, shaped by accumulated social interactions and the cultural practices that govern and shape them. There is no other person. Neural science has never been able to pin down where and how these interactions are consolidated and integrated. But no-one has ever demonstrated a location for anything like an independent self – or a language of the brain that might be used by an independent self. So there is no “Chinese room” in the brain – Chinese, or any other language the person has learned, is understood and used by the interactions among several areas of the brain. The same is true of all other actions. Killing the “man inside” leaves the argument for strong causality at best only slightly injured. However, the strong causality argument runs into two paradoxes. One is learning: If the neural system is incapable of even the weakest form of independent agency, then it is impossible to learn anything new, as several philosophers have concluded. Chomsky resolves this paradox for language by positing that a fundamental knowledge of language is innate. But that solution leads only to more paradox: The ability of humans to formulate and learn new ideas seems virtually infinite, but the genome is finite – and no-one has found evidence to support an innate “language of the brain.” The other paradox derives from evolution theory. We know that efficient use of resources is a fundamental law of evolution, and the human brain is an extraordinarily expensive organ, consuming 20% of the body’s energy intake. If it is incapable of assessing a situation, considering alternative courses of actions, overcoming the over-learned (fully caused) impulses in order to choose and enact the most promising, then how else does the large, expensive cerebral cortex pay for itself? Organisms live in an environment in which new events often occur more or less at random. If somehow a member of an already brainy species appeared (as a result of random alterations in DNA) with the ability to suspend or escape strong causality long enough to represent the current state of the organism in its environment then project and evaluate the results of alternative actions and choose the one that seemed most promising, this would present a tremendous improvement in reproductive fitness. Assuming a stray lightning bolt doesn’t kill the brainy-plus person, this capability would spread widely. That is precisely the primary function Antonio Damasio posits for the neural system, including the brain. All very nice, a strong causality proponent might object, but even the emergence of this new power is caused by something, and in turn it is constrained by the causal power of the neurons themselves and the data they report from the environment. I think this argument risks veering back into something very much like the homunculus error, in that it seems to impart an independent causal agency to the concept of causality. In an algorithm solving a complex set of equations, introducing a random number will often break the system free of a sub-optimal solution (a “local minimum”) so that it moves toward a better solution. The very appearance of a non-predictable event is random (with respect to the organism), with the potential to disrupt the routine, over-learned and fully caused response patterns. The ability to suspend these patterns long enough to consider and decide among alternative actions would be – is – a powerful contribution to reproductive fitness. No-one has yet shown how consciousness works. There is some evidence of how neural columns represent predicted futures and compare them to incoming data, but how all this is coordinated to produce agency is pretty fuzzy. However, projecting, evaluating, and choosing among actions and the alternative futures they present is one good candidate for answering the question, “what is consciousness for.” In sum, yes, most of our routine actions may be fully caused by the interactions among neural interconnections that are themselves determined by DNA+environment+experience. But some of these neural interconnections are capable of responding to unpredictable events in a considered way, i.e., they have agency. Agency is much more limited than we think it is, but it is real, and it makes an important contribution to reproductive fitness.