What is free will? What is practical agency? What is human personhood? And how are human free will, practical agency, and human personhood really possible in the natural world as it is correctly characterized by the modern natural sciences, especially physics, chemistry, biology, and cognitive neuroscience? Or more compactly put: given the truth of modern science, how is human free agency really possible? Let us call this the freedom question. In Deep Freedom and Real Persons, Robert Hanna provides a rationally decisive and true answer to the freedom question, by working out and defending a Kantian real metaphysics of human free will, practical agency, and persons in a thoroughly nonideal natural and social world. In view of this metaphysical conception, to borrow an apt phrase from the later Wittgenstein, my own free agency is just my own “form of life,” and free agency, as such, grows naturally in certain minded animal species or life-forms. Correspondingly, freedom grows naturally and evolves in certain species of minded animals, including the human species, precisely because minds like ours grow naturally and evolve in certain species of animals, including the human species. This thesis, which Hanna calls The Freedom-in-Life Thesis, is a central part of the doctrine he calls Natural Libertarianism. According to Natural Libertarianism, freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from mind, and mind is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life; hence freedom is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from life. Life is dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerges from asymmetric matter and/or energy flows. So, according to Natural Libertarianism, freedom, mind, and life are all dynamically inherent in and dynamically emerge from asymmetric matter and/or energy flows. If Natural Libertarianism is correct, then it also directly entails biologically-oriented theories of what Hanna calls real personhood and real personal identity, which I call, collectively, Minded Animalism. According to Minded Animalism, you and I and the folks living next door are all real persons who are each literally identical—by which I mean numerically identical, or token-identical, and also personally identical—one-to-one, with the complete, finite, and unique life of some individual minded animal in the class of all minded animals. Then real personal identity is not an identity relation between a mind and a mind, or between a body and a body, or even between an animal and an animal. On the contrary, real personal identity is an identity relation between an animal’s life-process and an animal’s life-process
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