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

Welcome!

[Taimat]

I for one welcome our new cyborg fruit fly overlords!

Re:Welcome!

[nxtr]

You're laughing now, but wait until they have us farm for fruit en masse, as I understand it from the summary.

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?

Re:Welcome!

[Frosty Piss]

This is all we need. Look out, PETA will soon be describing fly strips as insect murder...

Re:Welcome!

[fireman sam]

Wouldn't that be considered insecticide?

Re:Welcome!

[Opportunist]

The Slashdot reflex. Kinda like Pawlow described it.

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.

Re:Welcome!

[Plunky]

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

Its the American Idiot Syndrome. (Over here in Soviet Russia, its the Fruit Flies that welcome the new overlords..)

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:Welcome!

[background image]

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:Welcome!

[cp.tar]

It's Pavlov.

Does it ring a bell?

Joke?

[pipatron]

The result, joked neurobiologist Björn Brembs from the Free University Berlin, could be "world robot domination."

Oh yeah? I bet that in 5 years, he won't consider that a very fun thing to joke about!

So...

[Icarus1919]

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

Huh?

[UbuntuDupe]

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.)

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

Damnation!

[BillGatesLoveChild]

> 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.

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.

freedom?

[dwater]

Freedom? In Germany?

I thought the USA was the only place where there was freedom...

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.

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

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.