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Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Will
Lucas123 writes "A study performed at the Free University Berlin on human free will has produced some unexpected results showing that fruit flies may have a spark of free will in their tiny brains." From the article: "Their behavior seemed to match up with a mathematical algorithm called Levy's distribution ... Future research delving further into free will could lead to more advanced robots, scientists added. The result, joked neurobiologist Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin, could be "world robot domination."
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Apparently I don't have any free will. Posting that reply was involuntary
If the fruit flies had no "free will" then their behavior would be completely determined by outside circumstances or be random. As the article says, "free will" must exist somewhere between complete randomness and complete determinism. The result of the study is that flies in sensory deprivation exhibit a non-uniform random distribution -- that is, their behavior shows structure, and is neither completely random nor completely predictable. Hence, a spark of "free will".
Well, what do you think is going on inside yours? Are you quite sure that physics can paint a complete picture of the universe?
I guess you do think that physics can completely describe the universe. But on what grounds are you claiming that this universe is [solely] a physical one? (Note that to approach the question of whether or not the universe is physical from the point of view of physics instantly involves you in question-begging again...)
If you're actually interested in thinking about that question, you may want to look into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Since you seem to enjoy jumping to conclusions, I will point out that I'm not claiming Kant was right about everything or about anything in particular, but the idea he called "Transcendental Idealism" is still tantalizing enough to be taken seriously by some philosophers, though not by some others.
In extremely brief terms, Kant postulated that space and time, rather than being entities in their own right are characteristics of our 'minds,' (my oversimplification, not Kant's), and that the only way we can understand the universe is in spatiotemporal terms regardless of what the universe might actually be 'like'. In other words, it's conceivable that the universe is not spatio-temporal per-se--and if it's not, then physics cannot provide an exhaustive description of it.
The point is that determinism is a tricky business, and it can't be dismissed or proved as casually as you would have us believe.
I guess a blind man wouldn't be self-aware, then ?
Seriously speaking, the test is utterly flawed, because it assumes that
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Wow! I've been /.ed. Well, I never... :-)
/. discussion, I think I've lost my free will. Now where did I put it? Anybody here seen it? Maybe these pesky flies stole it? :-)
Once I realized it, I felt so compelled... I, I just had to address the
Of course, our original study makes no mention of free will, it is not a scientific concept. However, spontaneity even in flies makes us ponder what, if anything, this might entail for our subjective experience of free will in a macrocosm we believe to be largely deterministic. Therefore we addressed the issue with an ironic question in our press release: "Do fruit flies have free will?"
http://brembs.net/spontaneous
Of course, the media will drop the question mark, because questions don't sell. Some journalists even told me their editors told them to emphasize the free will thing precisely for this reason. That's fine with me. The debate got re-ignited and that's a good thing, I believe. The discussion here shows that. You can see all the coverage and blogosphere discussion linked at:
http://bjoern.brembs.net/
Scientifically, the most important aspect (which understandably got a little buried by the media) is that we found evidence for a brain function which appears evolutionarily designed to always spontaneously vary ongoing behavior. There is tentative evidence that such a function may be very widespread in the animal kingdom, including humans. Why would all brains have this function? If this were indeed the case, we might have discovered the first evidence for something truly fundamental to our understanding of brains.
Take it easy folks,
Bjoern
Science is a lot like sex. Sometimes something useful comes of it, but that's not the reason we're doing it.
This is the exact same argument that the person in article makes, and one which I find totally wrong. It's a fallacy of the false choice: that it it either has to be deterministic or it has to be random. We talked this in Metaphysis in college, and it's simply not true. Many free will advocates will tell you that the concept of choice can be based on neither.
To put it in terms you use, it's not random. It is, as you say, "based on something", but that something is NOT deterministic. Nor is it random. It's CHOICE. Now, pure determinists simply can't wrap their head around this. They think anything you would WANT to do must be based on something deterministic, and the prospect of being governed by truly random processes is too terrifying to accept. So this either/or argument is certainly not new, but it's used almost entirely by determinists. There are very few "randomists". The vast majority of remaining free will philosophers believe in a third way that is neither. They believe in choice.
To be fair, Pawlow is the German orthography, and Pavlov is in English. You're both wrong though cus the guy's name is actually ??????.