Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Will 375
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."
Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Insightful)
If people really have free will, why do they keep automatically making that "I for one welcome our new overlords" joke?
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Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
It's Pavlov.
Does it ring a bell?
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Curse my DRM-infested eyeballs that are unable to decrypt the name!
What the ? marks mean (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] 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".
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If people really have free will, why do they keep automatically making that "I for one welcome our new overlords" joke?
It said "Fruit Flies Show Spark of Free Will". It says nothing of people. Clearly the facts show that people do not possess any sort of free will. I mean, how else would one explain American Idol?
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Was funny, but not after the 1000th time (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Was funny, but not after the 1000th time (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Funny)
Zap! (Score:2, Insightful)
In Soviet etc (Score:2)
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I thought this was supposed to be stuff that mattered, not stuff tha
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly do you think you have proved with by observing that in an identical world, things would be identical? Does the word "tautology [google.com]" 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.
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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.
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Informative)
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...)
If you're actually interested in thinking about that question, you may want to look into Kant's Critique of Pure Reason [google.com]. 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 [bu.edu], though not by some others [google.com].
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.
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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).
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For all we know, the things that are going on inside our heads, might just as well be described as "magic". We do not know how the brain works, we may suspect it works similarly to a computer, but then again, it wouldn't be the first time people are wrong about how the brain works. Earlier theories have involved everything from souls, to telephone switchboards, and as far as I know, the only thing that has definitely been proven, is that the brain does not work the same way as a telephone switchboard.
Simi
All these years you knew the answer... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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"To speculate on the motivation..."
It sounds like you're already assuming that there's a mind behind it.
I know exactly what you mean. Because that is the point I was making to GP ;)
Some people dislike this and they look for explanations in meta(beyond) physics."
They can just as easily say that some people don't like the uncaring universe that science reveals, and that's why they run to religion.
Which is an entirely valid opinion. My point in reply to GP's reference to "crazy religious people" is that science can't speculate on any motivation behind observed phenomena, including whether motive exists at all or not. That's the reason I brought up my hypothetical Maker, to put forth a little mental experiment; is it conceivable [wiktionary.org] that It may have made the rules so that It can tamper with them? Yes, it is. Not very logi
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Things are the way they are because that's how we label them.
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 thin
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Think of it this way- imagine there are two universes:
A. Our universe (with all the rules of physics exactly as they are)
B. Another universe where massive bodies repel- not attract, but everything else is exactly the same as ours.
We know for certain that Universe A c
Re:Welcome! (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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.)
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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' 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).
Joke? (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah? I bet that in 5 years, he won't consider that a very fun thing to joke about!
So... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... 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?
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Take it to philosophy 101, kid.
Um.... Slashdot is philosophy 101.
If that.
Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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That said, however, they don't define free will beyond that.
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Re:So... (Score:4, Informative)
I guess a blind man wouldn't be self-aware, then ?
Seriously speaking, the test is utterly flawed, because it assumes that
Neurobiologist... (Score:3, Funny)
Psuedo-science at best (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
First, Levy's distribution [wikipedia.org] 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.)
then let's get to the real issue (Score:4, Funny)
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But isn't free will, by definition, BOTH non-random and non-deterministic?
How do we know that free-will is non-random and non-deterministic? Even if flies followed a very distinct pattern, how would we know they weren't choosing that pattern? If there behavior was random, maybe we could just say they were making random decisions of their own free will.
We can't (Score:2)
Even if we make a machine that *seems* to exhibit free will, we won't be any closer to understanding the subject. For now these discussions and dissertations are firmly entrenched in the realm of philos
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Well, the concept of free will must be, by definition: free actions are neither pure chance (random) nor purely determined by external factors. As you note, someone can choose to make a decision based on a random factor. For example, if someone asks me if main street is north or south of here, I often flip a coin, say "heads is north, tails is south", look at the result, and then give the answer. But one can distinguish a "choice to be rand
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The question, of course, is whether any behavior can meet the characteristics we ascribe to free will.
Also whether any behavior can be definitively said not to be free will.
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Agreed that the issue is somewhat orthogonal to religion. Religion has 'fate' while atheism has 'determinism'.
Just critizising the article, really. I find "Free Will" to be very much an abuse of semantics, anyway. A 'pseudoproblem', I believe it's called. The term shouldn't be used in an scientific article. If they mean that the
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, but you see, one doesn't follow the other - they're entirely independent. I am atheist; I hold no belief in a god or gods. This does not mean that I presume that the universe is governed by immutable behaviors and effects, or behaviors and effects that are mutable, or a combination of the two. In fact, I don't know, and I don't presume to
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If that's the case, then Redemption has no value (Score:3, Insightful)
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 onl
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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This is the exact same argument that the person in article makes, and one which I find totally wrong. It's a fallacy of the false choice: that it it either has to be deterministic or it has to be random. We talked this in Metaphysis in college, and it's s
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The elephant in the room is: how can choice occur? It's positing a cause->effect relationship between a conceptual person and the physical actions he takes. That your *mind* - not si
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Except for every waking moment.
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Of course, one of the problems of materialism is that this notion of independent, non-deterministic action arising from physical substance seems rather unlikely and at odds with all other known physical phenomena. And on the other hand, for
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I sat through a lecture at the Evangelical Philosophical Society in which Dr. Steve Lemke presented a paper on "How to be
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Every week, a new discovery (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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No, actually we won't. Just like your dog will never understand the subtleties of modern aqueducts.
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Simply put, we are not capable of understanding what our human descendants or our descendant species will be able to understand. To pretend otherwise is mere hubris.
Two of a kind (Score:4, Interesting)
If humans have an abundance of freewill, is it really surprising that less complex but similar creatures may have a small share?
Re:Two of a kind (Score:5, Insightful)
Damnation! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Free will? (Score:2, Informative)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Apparently I don't have any free will. Posting that reply was involuntary
Spark! (Score:2)
Re:Damnation! (Score:4, Funny)
Not robots? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I think they are saying that the flies do have something like that, which is what they are defining as "free will". There's nothing "mere" about it, since any animal (including human) behaviour is going to be something similar.
Did anyone else... (Score:2, Funny)
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I knew it. (Score:2)
-Stor
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Oh, please. (Score:4, Insightful)
What theory of free will predicted this?
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
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Quantum effects determine how chemical reactions and electrical signals act, and the "smaller" the event gets, the more this is so. Your mind uses very small electrical and chemical mechanisms; significant quantum effects are quite likely as a direct consequence. This is where the counter to your argument may make itself felt. As an example, quantum effects are critical to the functioning
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Free will to choose what they like... (Score:3, Funny)
Fruit flies like a banana.
Speech recognition 101 (Score:2, Redundant)
"Fruit flies like a bananna."
It's hard to wreck a nice beach...
Evil fruit flies (Score:2)
And they should.
They've been slacking off! We humans have used our free will to spread destruction and mayhem over the whole earth. Next time I go out for the weekend and forget half of a mango, I expect to come back to a miniature third reich on my kitchen counter. I want to see the fruit flies herding gnats into concentration camps and gassing them. I want to see them goose-stepping their way into my neighbours flat. I want to
Did anybody else... (Score:2)
More ammunitions for animal rights crpativists (Score:2, Funny)
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.
A bit of intelligence is formidable in groups (Score:3, Funny)
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
mix up in the meanings of "random" (Score:2)
Can it matter? (Score:2)
Does the internal process used to determine behavior matter, if the end result can be thought of as a black-box. In other words, if an entity behaves a certain way (random, non-random, semi-random, predictable, unpredictable) but it is impossible to tell if the internal process generating that behavior is using free-will, computations, soul, hampsters-running-on-wheels, then DOES IT MATTER?
How do you define free-will if the result of free-will and non
Randomness ain't it (Score:2)
What is "choice?" (Score:2, Insightful)
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)?
What? Are some of them using Linux now? (Score:2)
freedom? (Score:5, Funny)
I thought the USA was the only place where there was freedom...
Do those fruit flies have my free will? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [brembs.net]
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/ [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