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

So...

[Icarus1919]

By their logic, chaotic systems = free will. So the weather really does have a mind of its own?

Re:So...

[gronofer]

By their definition, the fly makes a decision about what it will do and hence has "free will". I.e., it's not constrained to a single choice by its environment, and it's not making a random selection between available choices.

This seems reasonable enough to me.

Psuedo-science at best

[QuantumG]

More like biologists that took a few too many liberal arts classes.

I don't know if it is the MSNBC write up or the "experiment" itself, but this has got to be the most vacuous thing I've ever read.

Re:Welcome!

[flyingsquid]

I for one welcome our new cyborg fruit fly overlords!

If people really have free will, why do they keep automatically making that "I for one welcome our new overlords" joke?

Not robots?

[ThanatosMinor]

So the article seems to be saying that in the absence of external stimuli, the flies tend to move in patterns that match a mathematical model. I fail to see how this precludes them from merely having brains with hardwired instruction sets that tell them how to fly in zigzag patterns looking for food. Couldn't a robot do exactly that?

Oh, please.

[Black Parrot]

If it's free will, how come it matches a mathematical distribution?

What theory of free will predicted this?

Re:Huh?

[crayz]

I'd argue the fundamental problem is the lack of any real definition of what "free will" is. Free will can't simply mean that different individuals follow different patterns - that would be expected through variations in neural wiring as a result of genetics. Free will to me means something approaching a "soul" - a non-materialist inner part of me that can make "decisions" about how I will act. In other words "I" - under a definition of "I" that involves more than just patterns of neural activity - can make choices based on beliefs and reasoning, and then act on those beliefs

As far as I can tell this would require some sort of new scientific discoveries to even be possible. Nothing we currently know about the universe supports the concept of a coherent mental entity capable of making decisions that affect the physical world; in fact everything seems to imply the opposite, that the physical world would determine the structure and behavior of our mind, and that consciousness and the perception of free will is some sort of emergent effect from all the (entirely deterministic) processes going on inside our brains

Not a very pleasant view of existence, but so far I've seen nothing to counter it. Free will becomes simply an illusion, and it's no wonder that a study of an insects' flight patterns would do nothing to prove it real. There's not even a coherent concept that can be proved or disproved, just a name for a thing people believe they experience and want to believe is true

Re:Two of a kind

[Mr2001]

If humans have an abundance of freewill, is it really surprising that less complex but similar creatures may have a small share? Only to those whose religious beliefs lead them to think humans are categorically different from every other species.

Re:Welcome!

[background image]

Anyone with who is physically identical to you in an identical situation (with the requisite identical past experiences) would do exactly the same thing as you are doing right now and at every moment from now until you're dead. At which point their body would decompose in an identical manner.

What exactly do you think you have proved with by observing that in an identical world, things would be identical? Does the word "tautology" mean anything to you?

If you think physics settles the question of free will, then I'd guess you're not that well versed in either physics or philosophy.

All these years you knew the answer...

[caitsith01]

...and you only just shared it with us? Many have died in vain.

Or maybe your essentially newtonian and deterministic view of reality is based on assumptions which conveniently can never be proven or disproven. You know, just like crazy religious people.

I mean, does it even occur to you that if you could, somehow, recreate the *exact* same state of affairs twice to see what would happen, then it might still be possible for two different outcomes to occur? Not because of anything measurable or predictable, but because that's just how things are?

If you think "physics" or, for that matter, "reality" is all newtonian levers and collisions then you will no doubt say that it's impossible. But if reality simply doesn't behave like that then you might be wrong, and you couldn't prove it one way or another.

To take one, limited example: what if in a given situation a whole range of outcomes happen, but the infinite number of different outcomes lead to an infinite number of different, quasi-parallel universes? Simply because your consciousness is limited to observing one of these at a time doesn't mean that it's "the only thing which could have happened", does it? However, to you, there is only one, seemingly consistent, version of reality. I'm sure there are problems with this example but perhaps it conveys the essential point.

More significantly: if everything is deterministic based on "physics", could you please tell us where the rules of physics come from, and why they are as they are and not some other way? For instance, why do massive bodies attract and not repel? Why does light travel at the speed it does? At some point there is an arbitrary "decision" as to how things work which cannot be explained by pre-determined rules - unless it's just elephants all the way down...

Re:All these years you knew the answer...

[Virtual_Raider]

More significantly: if everything is deterministic based on "physics", could you please tell us where the rules of physics come from, and why they are as they are and not some other way? For instance, why do massive bodies attract and not repel? Why does light travel at the speed it does? At some point there is an arbitrary "decision" as to how things work which cannot be explained by pre-determined rules - unless it's just elephants all the way down...

You were on a roll up to this point. But here you seem to be falling for a different brand of question begging: you are tacitly assuming that there is "a reason" for things to be the way they are. So far the best explanation IMHO is another tautology... Things are the way they are, because that's the way they are.

That's the gripe with science that rational religious people have (and yes, they do exist), science can conceivably tell you how the universe works but can't tell you WHY it works that way. To speculate on the motivation for things to be the way they are is outside of the realm of science. Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics. So basically you have to big trends, either the universe "just happened" or it was somehow made. Science could tell you down to the very last quark how the universe works in either case, it doesn't matter to it whether something put it together like this or it was just a Big Freak Accident as long as there are strings of cause and effect leading from "A" to "B" to "C" and so forth.

Conceivably if the universe was made, and The Maker tweaked it at random here and there —i.e. by performing miracles— that would thwart science's efforts to explain things because it relies on repeatability and pattern-finding. But experience so far tell us that our reality has stable behavior that doesn't change in unpredictable ways. That doesn't rule out the possibility of a maker behind curtains, for all we know s/he/it may be tweaking the world and still staying within its rules. But science won't be able to distinguish intent from random accident because it operates from inside the environment and whether the "rules" were placed or they just sprung from nowhere, they still bind it.

Re:Welcome!

[kripkenstein]

Anyone with who is physically identical to you in an identical situation (with the requisite identical past experiences) would do exactly the same thing as you are doing right now and at every moment from now until you're dead.

That assumes that it is possible to have two separate physically identical systems, and that identical systems behave the same way. Many assumptions are made in that sentence. For example,

• Perhaps the laws of physics are not translation-invariant? That is, perhaps just by being in two different locations means the systems are different enough to behave differently. (This means that two truly identical systems must be in the same location, i.e., to be the same system.) Now, most physicists assume physics is in fact translation-invariant - but this is a working hypothesis, which might be altered by observations. (Note: everything here is also true for time-invariance.)
• Identical systems might behave differently if nature is governed (in part) by random processes. This, in fact, is implied by quantum mechanics. While quantum effects are virtually negligible for large systems, they can still have an effect.

Free will, even if it were relevant anywhere outside of philosophy, does not exist.

'Free will' is a concept human beings have discussed for thousands of years; much of that discussion was how to define free will. You seem to go by the "Free will = capability of identical systems to do something different in the same situation" definition, which some scientists seem to like. And that is fine. But there are other ways to define it (Hume, for example, had a popular definition. Look on Wikipedia if you are curious). This then becomes a discussion about definitions, which is to say, philosophy.

When you want to determine the motion of a 2-body system, you need physics. When you want to discuss definitions of terms thousands of years old, you need philosophy (once you settle on a definition, physics might then be of help, of course).

Re:Was funny, but not after the 1000th time

[It'sYerMam]

Humour, by definition, is whatever people find funny, and what people find funny has not been definitively categorised and analysed in every case. Therefore, while perhaps some, many or even most people don't find repetitive humour (i.e. running jokes) funny, some people do. What you perhaps actually meant was that you don't find repeated, i.e. running, gags funny, which is quite different from a claim about what constitutes "real comedy."

And, since so many comedies of various forms use repetition (catchphrases are an obvious example, running jokes amongst a group of friends, reciting of Monty Python) you don't even have the basis of a claim to "most people find repetition non-funny." From experience, if running jokes are simply remember old humour, then that doesn't actually alter the experience from new humour, especially given that, if execute successfully, a running joke gets funnier each time, not stale.