The Architecture of Agency: How Evolution Uses Information to Override Physics

What if everything you've ever chosen—your job, your relationships, your values—was never really your choice? Neuroscientists and philosophers increasingly argue that free will is an illusion—your decisions pre-programmed by genetics, childhood, and context. Yet our lived experience insists otherwise. We feel we choose, and society expects us to act accordingly.

So which is it? Do we truly have agency—or are we just playing out a script?

This article suggests we are asking the wrong question. Instead of rewinding the tape of life to debate what could have happened, we should focus on future outcomes by choosing wisely in the present.

The better question is not whether we have free will, but how we can use our available agency to make better decisions—especially ones that counter our genetic and environmental defaults.

That shift—from backward-looking judgment to forward-looking action—is not just philosophical. It’s practical. And it’s where tools like Definitive Choice can help us navigate life’s complexity with greater clarity and confidence.

About the author:  Jeff Hulett is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM. Today, Jeff is an executive with the Definitive Companies. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides personal finance seminars. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions -- at www.financerevamp.com/book

Brian Klaas, a professor at University College London, asks a provocative question: “If you could rewind your life to the very beginning and press play, would everything turn out the same?” [x] This is the “rewind the tape” metaphor: the past is a single recorded line, but is the future a choice of many possible tapes?

Determinists, like Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, argue that the movie would play out exactly the same way every single time. [iii] For Sapolsky, human behavior is the result of an unbroken, cumulative biological chain. It isn't just "nature and nurture" acting as outside influences; it is a seamless causal loop stretching from the neurochemistry of a second ago, to the hormone levels of this morning, to the epigenetic effects of childhood, and all the way back to evolutionary pressures millennia ago.

In this view, there is no "causal agent" standing outside of biology to move the lever. Sapolsky argues that what we experience as "choice" is actually a post-hoc narrative—our prefrontal cortex observing a biologically destined action and then inventing a story to take credit for it. To a determinist, the feeling of agency is an evolutionary illusion, a protective feature of a brain designed to rationalize a life it isn't actually "leading."

Sapolsky’s view provides a sobering look at our biological constraints, but it may only be describing the 'hardware' of the system. To understand where agency enters the room, consider the piano metaphor often used in epigenetics. If our genome—the DNA we are born with—is the keyboard of a piano, then epigenetics is how that keyboard is played.  While a determinist might see a 'player piano' pre-programmed by history, the architecture of our biology suggests something more dynamic. The keys (our matter) are fixed, but the performance (our life) is an informational process. This leads us to a more empowering question: If the past provided the piano, who—or what—is choosing the song we play tomorrow?

Free-will advocates believe that while the past is set, the "next frame" of the movie is not yet filmed. They argue that we can end up on different paths through the application of conscious agency. This perspective is deeply embedded in Western culture and legal systems, which rest on the ironclad doctrine of personal responsibility. The American Declaration of Independence, for instance, assumes that the "pursuit of happiness" is a series of real, impactful choices made by free individuals. The United States Declaration of Independence unambiguously states:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Think of these "unalienable rights" as choices generated from free will. For example, Americans may choose to speak, assemble, pray, report, and petition the government as per the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Most importantly, within reason, Americans are free to choose how they express these unalienable rights. As an ironclad cultural doctrine, people are expected to make their own pursuit-of-happiness decisions. Free will is popularly considered one of the most precious rights we have in a free country. Many other countries have some form of free will integrated into their culture and constitutions.

For a deeper dive into free will, please see Solving the Decision-making Crisis: Making the most of our free will 

The free will perspective is supported by science and philosophical schools. For example, behavioral psychologist Carol Dweck considers the "growth mindset" as the key to unlocking the probabilistic future. [iv]  Her approach includes overcoming the challenges of the "fixed mindset" associated with determinism. A core tenet of the Stoic Philosophy is called the "dichotomy of control" [v] and is found on 3 levels:

• High influence: Our choices and judgments. To a stoic, this is our free will.

• Partial influence: Health, wealth, relationships, and behavior outcomes flowing from our and others' choices and judgments.

• No influence: Weather, environment, genetics, and most other environmental factors.

Anil Seth is a cognitive and computational neuroscience professor at the University of Sussex. Dr. Seth’s research conclusions [vi] align with the ancient Stoics’ Dichotomy of Control framework:

“[Free will] is a freedom to act according to our beliefs, values, and goals, and to do as we wish to do, and make choices according to who we are.”

The essence of the free will vs. determinism debate lies in its orientation toward the past.

To evaluate it, we must “rewind the tape” of our lives and ask whether events could have unfolded differently—making it a fundamentally backward-facing question. In contrast, decision-making is forward-facing. It requires us to act in the present, with incomplete information, to forecast uncertain futures. While related in theme, these are fundamentally different inquiries. The critical insight is this: we should focus less on whether we could have chosen differently in the past—and more on how to choose wisely today. That shift in time orientation is why the free will vs. determinism debate, though intellectually stimulating, is the wrong question for improving real-world decisions.

Why the free will vs. determinism question is the wrong question.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

― Søren Kierkegaard

Updating how the "free will vs. determinism" question is asked starts with

1) Reframing the question as an information question instead of a biology question, and

2) Reorienting toward decisions made in the present in order to choose a path in the uncertain future.

Today, those decision-makers have an incomplete set of information about the future.  Thus, decision-makers must do their best to forecast based on their understanding of the benefits they desire from that decision, net of the risks and costs impacting that decision.  The perceived net benefits are impacted by our deterministic environment.  Economists call the components of those net benefits “preferences” and the aggregation of those preferences as one’s decision utility.

It is our assessment of our benefits or utility that has wild volatility. The essence of our wild volatility is what behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists call a “failure of invariance.”  A failure of invariance is a term with a rich history.  Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman suggests a human failure of invariance is at the core of why individual rationality is both situationally and individually variant. [xi] This means, the traditional assumption there is one "rational" decision is fallacious. So, not only will any two people have different perspectives on their rationality, but the same person will also vary in their definition of rationality across different but apparently identical situations over time.  A failure of invariance challenges the traditional concept of rationality as a single point.  The new definition of diverse rationality is user-defined and based on varying situations and individuals. [xii] F.A. Hayek, the economist and Nobel Laureate, suggests that the way people utilize knowledge is the most basic problem of economics. Hayek said: "It is a problem of the utilization of knowledge not given to anyone in its totality."

This wild volatility emerges because our internal assessments are not fixed constants, but shifting reflections of incomplete information and changing contexts. Thus, the expression of freewill is based on decisions today impacting our future. Today's decision environment is fundamentally impacted by information and our assessment of available information. In this sense, volatility is the 'noise' created by our diverse rationality, which ironically provides the necessary opening for new information and goals to reshape our future path.

For a deeper dive: Please see the article How behavioral economics redefined rationality

It is acknowledged that our world has deterministic features based on physics, such as Einstein’s famous Special Theory of Relativity equation -> E= MC^2 or Newton’s Second Law of Motion equation -> F=MxA, and many others. These deterministic features extend directly into our neurobiology. At the cellular level, our brains operate on rigid electrochemical principles; an individual neuron fires only when it reaches a specific action potential, a process dictated by the deterministic exchange of Sodium (Na+) and Potassium (K+) ions across a membrane. If the polarity does not change, the neuron does not fire. There is no 'magic' in the ion channel.

Also, our past nature and nurture environment has a massive influence on the availability of and the challenge to make certain decisions.  Sapolsky does a great job describing those challenges.  In this way, determinists are narrowly correct.

However, and this is the essential point, how we experience the world, over time, is as if the world is indeterministic so long as the agents behave with wild volatility.  As an individual agent in the highly complex and information-incomplete world, the best that can be hoped for is that they make the best decision at the time the decision needs to be made. The paradox is that we live indeterministically in a world with deterministic features. This is why choice matters.

As a thought experiment, let us say you could play back the tape to an exact moment in the past.  Would we make the same decision, and would the world turn out the same? Without any more information and with the same decision processes, a determinist would argue we would not make a different decision, and the world would turn out the same.

At that point, the deterministic features of that world would have been identical. Let’s call our played-back world ‘Universe A.’  Now, what if we could clone Universe A?  We call this cloned world Universe B.  In both cases, Universe A and Universe B start at the same tape playback point with identical deterministic features. There is an identical you in these 2 worlds, with identical friends, family, and other environmental features.  In the next moment of our two cloned worlds, those worlds will diverge because of that wild volatility, which includes the failure of invariance.  This occurs because, in that next moment, Universe B will have small, randomly occurring differences from Universe A.  Those small, random differences could be a butterfly that flapped its wings a little differently, that we woke up a little bit earlier as compared to the other universe, or that one more person in Universe A randomly decided to read this article. This means that because we can never know every variable (the "hidden variables"), the world is effectively indeterministic to the human observer. This is known as Epistemic Indeterminism.

In two different universes with the same starting point and deterministic features, uncertainty and wild volatility will cause Universe A to vary from Universe B at the next point in both those universes’ future.  The differences between the universes may be small at first, but over time, chaos theory tells us their differences will grow substantially.  Those two universes are metaphors for different people and different situations of the same person as found with wild volatility. We can trace our current world back to identify the past deterministic features sculpting it. However, it is the beautiful, uncertain, and contingent current moment where the shift happens. Here, by assessing new information against our deterministic features, we transform a fixed past into a future world where we must behave as if it were indeterministic.

In two different universes with the same starting point, the differences may start small. However, Kevin Mitchell argues in Free Will that biological agency isn't about breaking the laws of physics, but about information having causal power over matter. While Universe A and B share the same physical laws, the 'noise' of the world ensures that as an agent processes information, their path will inevitably diverge. This 'wild volatility' is not a failure of the system; it is the 'slack' in the universe allowing agency to exist. The underlying assumption governing human and other life goals is that life wishes to persist. Given that the universe is constantly moving toward higher entropy associated with death, life's job is to reduce entropy and persist, at least long enough to replicate its genes in its offspring. [xii-a]

To understand why the free will debate often stalls, we must recognize that the past and the future are not made of the same "stuff."

The past path is defined by deterministic features. It is a fixed anchor forged by our genome, physics, and environmental impacts. In this sense, the determinists are right—you cannot "rewind the tape" and change the physical atoms of what has already occurred.

However, the future path is defined by information. While the past is a collection of physical facts, the future is a probabilistic field of potential. This is where attention and goals provide the lever for choice. Our agency has the ability to use information to navigate "wild volatility." By focusing our attention, we filter the noise and collapse a thousand possible futures into one intentional present.

But where exactly is this attention and goal lever located? In neurobiology, this is described by Stanislas Dehaene’s Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). Think of your brain’s default programming—your genetics and habits—as a series of automated, local processors running in the basement. They are efficient but deterministic. [xii-b]

Consciousness is the 'Global Workspace' upstairs. It is a biological 'control room' that allows us to pluck a piece of information from the automated basement and broadcast it to the entire brain. This global broadcast is the moment we stop reacting and start deciding. It is within this workspace that our goals can override our default programming, turning a default physical reflex into a meaningful, intentional choice.

So, the degree to which the world is deterministic or we have free will is the wrong question. I propose the correct question is -- How can people behave in the decision moment to make the best decision, given both their priors and their opportunities?  In this case, we do not have perfect information and we need to make the best decision we can TODAY.   Then, in the moments that follow, we will need to make varying decisions because wild volatility ensures those future moments include uncertainty.  Part of this is recognition of what Buddhists call "emptiness." This is the idea that we are the sum of all those around us. Effectively, our existence is only a reflection of the world around us. We are an empty, ever-changing vessel crafted by our impermanent environment.

The Empty Spot - A Buddhist “Emptiness” Metaphor: Imagine all the people you know, and the different elements of your environment are pieces of a mosaic. The pieces start in a jar near an empty canvas. The canvas represents the entire scope of your life. All the things that make you "you" will be found somewhere on that canvas. Over time, those pieces get poured out of the jar and fall, some haphazardly and some with purpose, to affect that canvas. But unlike paint, the pieces never dry to become fixed. Your life’s mosaic pieces change – some slowly and some more rapidly. The jumble of moving pieces of your life leaves an empty spot in the middle of the canvas. That empty, ever-changing spot is you.

This Buddhist approach is descriptive of wild volatility.  That is, we cannot help but be impacted by the wild volatility of the world around us.  Since all those around us are subject to wild volatility, then we must have a way to respond that makes the most of those fluid and dynamic situations.  Our choices are our response to wild volatility and ultimately influence others and our own future. 

To summarize, our choices:

1. Our choices are based upon an impermanent reflection of those around us -> Buddhism 

2. Our choices can be made with a growth mindset to make the most of an indeterministically perceived future -> Behavioral Psychology / Dweck

3. Our choices can be made with appropriate judgments in the decision moment -> Stoicism

4. Functionally, our consciousness is the attention and goal lever creating a decision space which enables decisions other than the default decisions of a world with deterministic features -> GNWT / Daehene

What I am calling “free will” is a function of the wild volatility that creates an environment behaving with what we perceive as indeterministic in the moments that follow.  Our perception of free will empowers our choices in a world with deterministic features and wild volatility.  If we behave as if the world is fixed or pre-wired by determinism, we are less likely to own and energize those high-influence choices impacting our future. Thus, having a deterministic attitude causes deterministic outcomes. Conversely, behaving as if freewill is available and we have choice agency, enables us to impact our future beyond our default nature and nurture environment.

Depending on where one falls on the free will vs. determinism question, our past path to the present may have been impacted by free will, determinism, or some combination of both.  However, regardless of the past path source, it is the quality of the choices we make in the present that will impact our outcomes in the indeterministic future.

As such, individuals can greatly help themselves by improving their decision-making ability and by frequently updating their beliefs as new information is realized.

Now, a strict determinist would say, “If you did improve your decision-making ability, it was because of a complex web of determinist physics, environmental factors, and behaviors that made this better decision moment inevitable.  It was not an actual choice based on free will.”

In my head, I am thinking that we have both a deterministic impact on our biology plus a consciousness mechanism enabling our free will. But my response is focused on outcomes: “It does not matter the source of that choice to learn better decision-making.  I am glad you read this article!  Do your best to choose better decision-making processes.  Plus, tell other people as well.  Think of yourself as a pebble being dropped in the pond of good decisions.  The more and bigger the pebbles, the bigger and more frequent the emanating waves of good decisions will occur.”

In the article, How to create your own opportunity: The garbage picker’s choice, a case study is provided to show how all people may access our choices to change our future. 

N.N. Taleb does a nice job describing life’s inevitable volatility. Taleb said: “Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.” We can take advantage of that inevitable volatility via our relationships with things that benefit from volatility.  In mathematics, those things are known as inputs to convex transformation functions. [xiii] 

1) We can identify things that expose us to those volatility-benefiting convex functions.  The time value of money, maintaining long-term healthy behaviors, and intentional exposure to serendipity are examples of such convex functions. As an example, Taleb suggests one of his favorite pastimes is "flaneuring," which is his way of exposing himself to the convexity benefits of serendipity.  Thus, flaneuring is an input to the serendipity convex transformation function.  This is just like savings are an input to the time value of money convex transformation function, and healthy habits are an input to our long-term health convex transformation function.

2) We can and should make choices taking advantage of inevitable upside volatility and protecting ourselves from the ruin associated with inevitable downside volatility.  In the personal finance world, dollar cost averaging by consistently investing in well-diversified growth portfolios is an example of a convex function that takes advantage of upside volatility and protects us from the ruin associated with downside volatility. [xiv]

3) Choice architecture solutions like "Definitive Choice" are not about predicting the future perfectly; it’s about choosing paths where the upside of being right is greater than the downside of being wrong. This moves the debate from "Is this choice free?" to "Is this choice robust?"

The idea of this graphic is that our choices matter. While we can completely control almost nothing, we can influence virtually everything. In a world of wild volatility, we can think of our decisions as a portfolio of many choices, with each one influencing the probabilistic outcome of those decisions. Physicist and ergodicity expert Luca Dellanna captures the essence of this "forward-facing" strategy: [xv]:

"The best strategy depends on whether you are the gamble or the gambler"

To apply this, we must distinguish between the two: The "Gamble" is an individual event or choice—a specific path that may be subject to deterministic physics or sudden volatility. The "Gambler" is you—the conscious agent (the Global Workspace) managing a lifelong portfolio of these events.

A poor decision-maker identifies as the gamble, obsessing over the outcome of a single roll of the dice. A "Choice Architect," however, identifies as the gambler. Their goal is not to win every single roll, but to ensure they stay in the game and maximize long-term value. This means:

1. Avoiding "Zero": The Gambler uses their agency to ensure against "catastrophic downside"—like permanent health loss or financial ruin. If a single "gamble" results in zero, the Gambler ceases to exist.

2. Harvesting Convexity: The Gambler seeks out "convex" opportunities—small, frequent investments in health, learning, or diversified savings where the potential upside is vast but the cost of the "gamble" is small and manageable.

The bell curves on our path represent the "wild volatility" of the moment. We cannot control exactly where the ball lands on any single curve (the Gamble). But by using our Architecture of Agency, we can ensure that we only take gambles that allow us to survive, thrive, and compound our successes over time (the Gambler).

Why the free will v determinism question is a good question.

(but still leads us back to why it is the wrong question!)

Thus far, our focus has been on what economists refer to as Positive Economics—the analysis of “what is.” This branch of economics seeks to describe and explain observable behavior and outcomes without prescribing judgments. However, to ask what should be done in response to those outcomes takes us into the realm of Normative Economics, which is rooted in values, ethics, and policy. Here, we cross from explanation to intervention—posing the essential question: If we don’t like the world as it is, what can we do to change it?

Regardless of the degree to which free will and determinism impact our decisions in the present, the deterministic factors we mentioned earlier certainly exist. Strict determinists make a good point because people have no control over those deterministic factors. As such, how can people be held accountable if they have little ability or agency to impact those deterministic factors? For example, our genome, hormones, and neurobiology are almost completely a result of our parents and early childhood conditions. Adults have no ability to “rewind the tape” and undo those factors in the present. Next are a few examples:

Criminal Justice: This deterministic thinking could certainly impact criminal justice policy. Clear punishment guidelines may make sense to discourage people from choosing a criminal action. However, a determinist suggests the individual had little choice based on their priors, a regime of rehabilitation and training makes good sense. So, if we “lock ‘em up” without rehabilitation, we are only reinforcing the priors, creating the criminal predisposition in the first place. When unrehabilitated criminals are released from prison, we should expect nothing less than recidivism.

Systemic bias in banking data: Deterministic thinking also impacts credit policy and how we think about assessing people’s credit for making loan decisions. Traditionally, the FICO score assesses a credit applicant’s ability to repay a loan in the future. This is accomplished by evaluating the credit applicant’s past payment behavior. At its core, usage of the score assumes a one-way causality arrow—that one’s past payment behavior will CAUSE their future loan performance. However, the determinists argue, with good effect, that people’s past data and performance were CAUSED by a lack of opportunity and their priors. Thus, to the determinist, the causality arrow is reversed. One's lack of opportunity CAUSES poor payment behavior. The systemic bias in the data used for the FICO score is a result of using a subset of banking data that only represents the lack of opportunity. A broader source of data, including data traditionally outside the banking system, like utility payments or rent payments, will create a more fulsome picture and help correct systemic bias found in the bank-only data.

Commitment devices: If we accept that our deterministic genome and environmental history make it difficult to consistently exercise decision agency, behavioral economics offers a powerful countermeasure—commitment devices. These are pre-commitments that help us do what we know we should do but often struggle to execute. For instance, many people understand the long-term importance of saving for retirement, yet fail to act due to present bias or emotional resistance. A commitment device might automatically transfer a portion of each paycheck from a checking account to a robo-advisor-managed retirement fund. Once in place, the individual no longer relies on willpower or memory—the decision structure works on their behalf. In this way, commitment devices create a framework that empowers better choices, even in the face of deterministic inertia. Mitchell’s research suggests that we are 'top-down' agents. We use our goals to constrain our lower-level impulses. Commitment devices—like automated savings or decision-making frameworks—are essentially information-management tools. They allow our 'future-oriented' goals to override our 'deterministic' biological inertia, effectively using choice architecture to guide our path through the volatility.

These are relevant “so what do we do about it?” questions and suggestions. There are certainly many more. These are for policymakers to debate. Naturally, there are different perspectives, usually divided into political party camps and other organizations attempting to effect change. The implications of what to do about it are beyond the scope of this article.

However, circling back to the “Why the free will v determinism question is the wrong question,” this brings us to one observation upon which Stoic philosophy would agree.  That is:  Focus on what you can control.  In the dichotomy of control framework, those are our choices and judgments TODAY.  Since most of us are not policymakers, we have little control over policy, other than our vote.  This leaves us with practical success advice:

1. Focus on what we can control, like choices and judgments

2. To get the most out of those choices and judgments, develop and grow a high-quality decision process.

Resources

To put a finer point on an essential Stoic teaching, it is our judgments of something that often lead us astray, not the thing itself.  So if something “bad” happens, we tend to assign “bad” to the thing.  A grounded Stoic appreciates that it is the judgment that relates to assigning “bad,” not the thing itself.  The thing is just a thing.

For example, if an investment goes down in value, we may consider the investment as “bad.”  It may or may not be.  The point is that it is our judgment that assigns it as bad, not the investment itself.  In fact, the stock market is incredibly volatile and subject to broad randomness.  Most investment price changes can only be explained by randomness.  So, our quick “bad” judgment of a downward-moving investment is often wrong.  We need a decision process that helps us overcome our quick-to-judge nature by better managing our judgments.  The point is that our judgments have value but only in the correct context.  Choice architecture, like Definitive Choice, provides that structure to make the most of our judgments.

Definitive Choice

Notes

[iv] Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, 2006

[v] The Roman Stoic Epictetus introduces the dichotomy of control at the very beginning of his Enchiridion (Handbook).

Epictetus, Enchiridion, 125 CE

To be fair - Free will deniers do not dispute that people make “high influence” choices and judgments.  The difference between free willers is that determinists don't believe people have independent causal agency over the physical matter in our bodies and brains.  Thus, decision-making is both deterministic and "internally caused," rather than caused by an independent top-down process from a separate consciousness. 

Thanks to Brian Klaas for his input on this clarification.

[vi] Seth, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness, 2020

[x] Klaas, Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, 2024

[xi] Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011

[xii] Hulett, Becoming Behavioral Economics — How this growing social science is impacting the world, The Curiosity Vine, 2023

[xii-a] Mitchell, Kevin J. Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

[xii-a] Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Viking, 2014.

[xiii] Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, 2012

[xiv] Hulett, Achieve Personal Finance success with a little math intuition, The Curiosity Vine, 2023

[xv] Dellanna, Ergodicity: Definition, Examples, And Implications, As Simple As Possible, 2020