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."

Comments

Re:Welcome!

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Well in the first place, you're assuming I'm taking the opposing position to yours. At this moment, I'm doing no such thing--I've only pointed out that your characterization of the free will problem was question-begging.

What is it that you think is going on inside your head? Do you think it's magic?

Well, what do you think is going on inside yours? Are you quite sure that physics can paint a complete picture of the universe?

... explain how, barring magic, any sort of "free will" can exist in a physical 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.

Re:So...

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But I don't think that the weather is self aware. Neither are fruit flies for that matter, IMO. Self awareness means that you'd be able to pass the mirror test for example.

I guess a blind man wouldn't be self-aware, then ?

Seriously speaking, the test is utterly flawed, because it assumes that

1. The entity in question has and uses reasonably sharp visual perception.
2. Can use visual perception (as opposed to, say, sound or smell) to tell individuals of its kind apart from each other.
3. Knows what itself looks like.
4. Has enough intelligence to understand the concept of a mirror.
5. Sees any reason to care about its reflection (since ignoring it apparently means it fails the test).

Do those fruit flies have my free will?

[Brembs]

Wow! I've been /.ed. Well, I never... :-)
Once I realized it, I felt so compelled... I, I just had to address the /. 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? :-)
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