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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."
I for one welcome our new cyborg fruit fly overlords!
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
Oh yeah? I bet that in 5 years, he won't consider that a very fun thing to joke about!
c++;
By their logic, chaotic systems = free will. So the weather really does have a mind of its own?
...joked. Then hastily looked over his shoulder and shuddered.
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
> Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Will
If they've got free will, does that mean they can go to heaven or hell?
Not hard to imagine Fruit flies swarming over the Apple in the Garden of Eden, though they would probably have preferred a banana.
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?
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Apparently I don't have any free will. Posting that reply was involuntary
Did anyone else read that as Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Wii ?
If it's free will, how come it matches a mathematical distribution?
What theory of free will predicted this?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
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".
In today's news:
PETA spokesperson Pamela Anderson declares lawsuits against bug spray manufacturers, claiming the manufacturers have 'systematically enslaved, tortured, murdered free-willed, innocent creatures for profit.' On another news, thousands of animal rights activists infested themselves with West Nile Virus and malaria, claiming they would rather die of infectious diseases than to harm a single insect.
That "spark" of free will was that @#@*! fruit fly hitting my bug zapper. Human free will to invent bug-killing devices trumps an insect's free will to kiss the suBZZZZZZTTTTTTT.
After watching a colony of ants outwit myself, my wife, and the poisoned baits we placed to annihilate them, I find it quite possible that the collective intelligence of meek creatures possessed of a little free will could rival the intelligence of a human being. ;^)
Ants can work together as well as we can, why not drosophila too? Remember those stories about the bees dying? Maybe they just decided not to come back to their cage, and are in hiding. Worse yet, maybe they've joined the killer bees!
The bee revolution will not be televised.
--
Toro
By "choice," do they mean free of self-determination and action independent of external causes?
Is it even possible for a living creature (human, animal, insect, etc.) to elect to do something in such a manner, being based on absolutely no external influence (i.e. environmental influences, genetics, a person's needs/well-being)?
Freedom? In Germany?
I thought the USA was the only place where there was freedom...
Max.
You're trying to tell me something other than a person has free will?
How preposterous. Next I suppose you'll be telling me animals have souls!
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
Well, as fruit flies might demonstrate... having free will doesn't oppose the possibility that one can have a teeny tiny brain.
...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...
Read Pynchon.
This may be just me being picky, but why was he marked redundant? I mean, QuantumFTL posted the joke only two minutes after the original poster. It's quite plausible that they were both reading the article at the same time, but due to the speed at which these threads tend to fill up, Quantum had not seen the original joke, and posted his own, as at the time the orginal post of the joke, was not there. But again, this could just be me being to picky.
Anyone got a light for my sig?
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.
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.
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.
im in ur
If you don't have "free will", then you never make any real choices, as all your decisions have been pre-made by God.
If that is the case, then God is just a puppeteer, playing out whatever puppet show He happens to like.
There is no Good or Evil, there is only God - and God wills the acts of the murderer or rapist every bit as much as He wills the actions of the teacher, preacher, or scientist.
No heaven, no hell, no salvation, no redemption - because these depend on humans making CHOICES, and choices are only meaningful if there is "free will".
"Free will" is a core aspect of Christianity. Without it, Christ Himself is meaningless.
Personally, I'm an Atheist, and a Secular Humanist at that. There are no gods or any other form of supernatural forces at work in the Universe. We, our sentience, and our free will, are the result of a spectacularly unlikely series of events, and so are immeasurably precious.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book