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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."
Okay, I should know better than to divine meaning from a mass-media source, but I tried.
First, Levy's distribution is a, you know, distribution, not an algorithm. I guess it meant to say that the algorithm weights a factor by Levy's distribution.
Then, after going through about eight paragraphs to find out what the hell the experiment did that was so relevant, it still didn't make sense. What bothered me was that one of the scientists see "free will" as being "somewhere between" deterministic and random. Now, I'm all for treating properties as cardinal and a matter of degree. But isn't free will, by definition, BOTH non-random and non-deterministic? How can it fall on a spectrum between them?
And what about the experiment makes "free will in flies" the best explanation?
(Oh, and on a side note: please spare us the story about religion: not all religions endorse free will, and not all atheists reject it.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
FTFA "UCLA neurobiologist Mark Frye noted that future work should isolate and understand the brain circuitry and genetic pathways responsible for this spontaneous behavior in flies "and whether or not they are conserved in other animals."
It seems that every week or so (can we get a Moore's law equivalent) we learn something new about brains (ours or some other animal) that we didn't know before. It's looking more and more like we are as programmed as any other lower animal but with higher level behaviors. For instance: your dog doesn't know how the tap water gets to your kitchen sink (maybe you don't either) but we humans do, though we don't know how the Universe was created, some day we might when we learn enough.
This does stand to be interesting to robotics. If you sit down to figure out the algorithm to get a robot out of a tight spot, 'a spark of free will' might be very VERY useful. The simple randomness of such might be what keeps most of us out of trouble most of the time anyway... we just don't realize it, or worse, we blame it on a deity?
I'm just amazed at how much we are learning these days compared to even just 50 years ago.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
We still debate whether humans have free will, but we can show that fruit flies have it.
If humans have an abundance of freewill, is it really surprising that less complex but similar creatures may have a small share?
Play Command HQ online
... which raises some questions: How do you determine whether something has free will? Are you sure you have free will? Even if you have free will, how can you be sure other people have free will?
Slashdot and various news outlets repeatedly refer to research on the PLOS-One web site as if its published in a journal. PLOS One is *not* a journal. Its a pre-publication, public comment forum, quite like slashdot actually. One editor decided a piece is interesting and the academic community is then invited to comment on it. To sum: if it sounds fishy, it probably is, and this article's argument (as many noted) doesn't make much sense. The fact that the fly canvasses an area in a way that lets is cover area efficiently does not imply either free will or lack of one either. In fact, observing behavior seems to be quite the wrong way to go at it. As Libet shows, people argue for 'free choice' occuring at certain times, where brain activity actually precedes those choices by ~ 400ms.
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. Physics does not magically govern everything except your brain. Free will, even if it were relevant anywhere outside of philosophy, does not exist.
I thought this was supposed to be stuff that mattered, not stuff that's irrelevant to any and all realistic views of the world?
The Farewell Tour II
What is it that you think is going on inside your head? Do you think it's magic? Outside of quantum randomness (assuming that it exists, which as far as anyone knows appears to be the case), which is irrelevant to the discussion of "free will" anyway, the exact same thing would happen. If you had "free will" you would be able to choose to make a different decision, which you clearly can't. Philosophy can think about what things might be like, or what they should be like, but nothing in it can change how things are.
Now come back and complain again when you can explain how, barring magic, any sort of "free will" can exist in a physical universe.
The Farewell Tour II
Even if the physical world is deterministic, there is still a huge difference between what a robot does and what a human does. If you like you call "free will": The illusion of "free will". It is a concept that make one entity behave different from another.
It is completely irrelevant for the discussion whether the world is deterministic or not, unless you are a fatalist.
You can if you say that quantum particles themselves have free will.
Play Command HQ online
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...)
For me, physics strives to completely describe the universe (by which I mean the complete set of sensory observations I, or presumably you encounter). Things like the mind, the soul, or other "non-physical" entities are either observable (in which case they fall inside the realm of physics) or unobservable (in which case they are irrelevant)./-\-/
Ah, semantics yes. My girlfriend always complains that we are arguing about what the words mean rather than the core issue so that in truth we are speaking of two or more different things. All I can say is that better-trained minds than mine have been arguing about it for centuries (not the same minds for all that time but it's late, I haven't slept and you surely get my drift :P). Just for the fun of it think about this: What if language doesn't define the world but the other way around and we label things the way we do because that's the way they are?
I can be wrong, but it's my understanding that generally we observe Phenomenon A1, and either consciously or as a result of a prehistoric grunt, then we give it a name whereby Phenomenon A1 then becomes "rain". We shape the words around the world, because the world is out there a-priori. Which is another statement that has been hotly debated, but whether that world is a shadow of Platonic Ideas, an objective reality or other, we still perceive something on average, and we develop our language around that perception. It may seem otherwise because of the way language is taught to us ("Look! this is An Apple"), but you were referring to the actual existence of things ("Oh, I have observed that Phenomenon A1 takes place. I shall name Phenomenon A1 'rain'"...then to another... "Look! this is Rain"). Words don't have meaning in and of themselves, they are labels we hang onto things. If we change the labels, things remain unchanged.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Wikipedia knows all. Hmm, it doesn't appear that Slashdot likes Cyrillic.
Oh, great, now I've triggered the lameness filter. Maybe by adding this paragraph, I can get around it. Really? 6 simple Cyrillic characters (and 6 question marks) makes this lame? Maybe if I add some more to this paragraph, it will forgive me. Now it's accusing me of making ASCII art. Huh, well, just look at the Wikipedia article, and I'll delete my "art".
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Repetition isn't real humor. It's the recollection of humor: the joke as an algorithm. It really is Pavlovian: you remember having found it funny once, and repeating it reminds you of that first moment (with diminishing returns.)
Real comedy involves an element of surprise and discovery: nothing is as funny as it is the first time you hear (or at least understand) it, because that's when the contradictions and paradoxes that make it funny are released as if they were pent-up energy.
The geek sense of humor - at least, the repetitive part of it (repeating Monty Python skits, for example) comes from a state of high anxiety, not really a spontaneously funny state of mind. It's motivated by a need for reassurance and safety, and its almost the antithesis of actual wit, which is risk-taking and treacherous.
I love geeks, don't get me wrong. But not for the humor.