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Any truly new information is therefore random and unpredictable. However, new information is not yet new meaning. Through their actions, people strive not only to create new information, but also to satisfy their needs. Meaning is not only determinateness or certainty, but also direction. New information must be inscribed in the existing culture in order to make sense. Any new meaning is both random and necessary. Quastler sees this as the answer to his question:

“The answer may be in the composer Pierre Boulez’s definition of artistic creation: ‘To make the unpredictable inevitable.’ To restate this beautifully succinct saying: if there is a truly new element in a work, then it should have been quite impossible to predict this element beforehand, on any basis; if the work is to be successful, then this unpredictable element must acquire the unavoidability of a law” (Quastler 1964, p. 17).

Meanings arise by chance and are transmitted by necessity. All meanings are accidental, but once established they become the norm. Quastler calls this “random and remembered choice.” “The ‘accidental choice remembered’ is a mechanism of creating information and very different in nature from mechanisms of discovering information” (Quastler 1964, p. 16).

If meanings evolve on their own, and not through human agency, then is not all culture the result of the evolution of meanings, their random changes, and selective retention? The stage of mixed natural and cultural selection lasted for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years; the stage of traditional choice lasted for thousands or tens of thousands of years. During this period, proto-human and early human populations self-reproduced by collective rather than individual action. Collective existence overshadowed the lives of individuals, their plans, and their destinies. Alfred Kroeber wrote that looking back over thousands of years of history, one might come to believe that hidden forces control individuals who have no influence over their lives:

“When one has acquired the habit of viewing the millennial sweeps and grand contours, and individuals have shrunk to insignificance, it is very easy to deny them consequential influence, even any influence—and therewith one stands in the gateway of belief in undefined immanent forces; a step more, and the forces have become mysterious” (Kroeber 1952, p. 9).

The difficult questions arise as to whether the individual is the origin of all action, whether he plays a significant role in the evolution of culture and whether man has free will at all.

As with natural selection, in the early stages of mixed selection, individuals were not its agents but merely inactive elements of self-reproducing populations—imitators and followers of first animal and then human traditions. A single human cannot reproduce himself. A human alone cannot give birth to or raise another human. He cannot even retain his common sense when alone. But as meanings accumulated in the course of mixed selection, the experience and sophistication of primitive communities increased, and with it the agency of individuals.

The increasing complexity of technologies, organizations and psychologies implies the emergence of consciousness and personality as its manifestation. Man becomes (self-)conscious and is a personality when he detaches himself from the community and at the same time searches for himself in a community of which he is a part. Michael Graziano writes that consciousness is a model of attention: we attribute attention to other people and therefore attribute it to ourselves (Graziano 2013). We would rather say that consciousness is a model of meaning: we attribute it to others and therefore attribute it to ourselves. Consciousness is a function that results from mental activity, that is, thinking:

“It is the ability to extract from mental activity its algorithms (methods), to evaluate the adequacy or inadequacy, the quality of one’s actions, to program, regulate and control them. A person extracts the criteria of consciousness from the environment, from its phenomena and moral and ethical standards accepted in the family, the environment and society as a whole” (Wiesel 2021, p. 136).

Consciousness was not given to humans from the beginning. Julian Jaynes wrote in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) that humans originally had no consciousness and that it only emerged in historical times, perhaps in the age of writing. (Self-)consciousness arose when the “voices” that told a person what to do became the voice of his own mind. He finds confirmation of this in the poems of Homer and other ancient authors:

“In distinction to our own subjective conscious minds, we can call the mentality of the Myceneans a bicameral mind. Volition, planning, initiative is organized with no consciousness whatever and then ‘told’ to the individual in his familiar language, sometimes with the visual aura of a familiar friend or authority figure or ‘god,’ or sometimes as a voice alone. The individual obeyed these hallucinated voices because he could not ‘see’ what to do by himself” (Jaynes 1976, p. 75). “Once established, once a man can ‘know himself,’ as Solon advised, can place ‘times’ together in the side-by-sideness of mind-space, can ‘see’ into himself and his world with the ‘eye’ of his noos [mind], the divine voices are unnecessary, at least to everyday life. They have been pushed aside into special places called temples or special persons called oracles. And that the new unitary nous (as it came to be spelled), absorbing the functions of the other hypostases, was successful is attested by all the literature that followed, as well as the reorganization of behavior and society” (ibid., pp. 287-8).

Robert Sapolsky suggests that free will is determined by a person’s ability to resist biological impulses (cf. Sapolsky 2017, p. 597). But where does this ability come from? It comes from the dual nature of humans—as animals and as social beings. In the Phaedrus, Plato compared the soul to the union of a pair of winged horses and their charioteer (Plato 1997, p. 524). In the Republic, he wrote that man is the unity of three principles: rational, affective (rage and desire for competition) and natural (passion and lust). “Do we learn with one part, get angry with another, and with some third part desire the pleasures of food, drink, sex, and the others that are closely akin to them? Or, when we set out after something, do we act with the whole of our soul, in each case?” (Plato 1997, p. 1067).

Socio-cultural experience is an accumulation of accidental and remembered choices transmitted through learning. An individual is able to choose at all because he has an essential part of this experience. Man as a cultural microcosm is a copy of society as a macrocosm. “…The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations” (Marx and Engels 1975-2004, vol. 5, p. 4). “Society” and “individual” are only two opposite points of the same “man” when considered as an abstraction. “Individuals may carry out actions traditionally indexed as ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’; however, these actions may properly be viewed as forms of relationship carried out on the site of the individual” (Gergen 2001, p. 119).

An individual accumulates individual experiences that enable him to make a choice between (counter)facts—provided they lie within the limits of his individual experience. A striking example is professional experience: the greater this is, the higher the person’s ability to make decisions in uncertain situations related to his occupation. In traditional agrarian societies, not only the society as a whole, but also an individual is capable of making decisions, that is, he has free will.

People develop through learning, through the accumulation of meanings that are passed on from generation to generation in the form of cultural experiences: norms, knowledge and skills. Increasing meanings are revealed in the complication of causal models, which reflect the relationships between goals and results of actions and are an accumulated prerequisite for new actions. A person becomes a subject when his experience allows him to reason and choose. In the beginning, the causal model (i.e. knowledge) is a means of activity, and at the end it becomes the subject himself (i.e. consciousness).

Free will is based on the multiplicity of meanings, on the human ability to invent counterfacts. Freedom is found at the intersections of necessities. In other words, the transition from selection to choice did not occur when (proto-)humans acquired the ability to choose, but when they learned what to choose from. Choice arose simultaneously with the ability to create counterfacts. Where, then, did the counterfacts come from? It is reasonable to assume that choice arose when contacts between communities began, so that members of the communities got to know each other and could compare and exchange meanings. Thus, the accumulation of cultural experience provided humans with the opportunity to choose actions.