Village Journals
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Resonate your identity with Naseeb journals. Express your opinions, share your thoughts, post your writings and connect with like minded people through the power of expression.
Free Will, Free Won?t, and Free Fly
?Until they came to a valley of the ants, an ant said, ?O ants, enter your homes, or else you will be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers, while they do not perceive.? He then smiled, amused at her statement. And he said, ?My Lord, help me be thankful for the blessings You have bestowed upon me and upon my parents, and to do the good work that pleases You, and admit me, by Your mercy, with Your righteous worshipers.?" -Quran 27:18-19
A few days ago, I left my bedroom?s window open to revel in the relatively cool breeze in an otherwise blistering hot and humid summer. The next day, I noticed in the living room a host of flies that apparently entered through the open window the other night. The flies would gather around the ravishing warmth of the light post in front of me. Startled and irritated, I crushed the frenzied flies to the wall, tactically, one by one.
A research article titled ?Order in Spontaneous Behavior? published in May 16, 2007 edition of the refereed science and medicine journal PLoS ONE www.plosone.org) presents some experimental evidence suggesting that fruit flies may have free will. A few news reports are posted below. More press coverage brembs.net). Researcher?s webpage brembs.net).
In my cat-and-mouse game with flies, what was quite interesting was that the more flies I killed, the more the other remaining flies would stay away from the light post. Did the flies learn that I would crush them to death if they came close to the light post? If so, was the altered response accompanied by the fly?s internal mental experience of free will? Is an ant or a fly a deterministic robot or an agent with free will? How about other insects and animals? If these creatures indeed have free will, then is their free will an expression of the brain?s neurochemistry alone, or a phenomenon that necessitates the existence of non-human ?souls?? The scrutinized fruit fly behavior might offer some interesting clues.
Nadeem
-----------------
Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices brembs.net/sciam)
Julie Steenhuysen
Scientific American Science News (May 15, 2007)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A tiny fruit fly -- without any input from the outside world -- will spontaneously change directions, researchers said on Monday in a finding that just may rescue the notion that free will not only exists but is a basic function of the brain.
"Neuroscientists have been claiming free will doesn't exist," said Bjorn Brembs, a neurobiologist of the Free University Berlin in Germany who led the study.
The claim is based on work in the 1980s by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet of University of California San Francisco, who discovered that even before a person made a conscious decision to move, the brain had already started the process of movement.
Neuroscientists say this so-called "readiness potential" suggests that the brain simply responds to outside stimuli, and consciousness is just the brain's way of rationalizing actions the brain has already determined to take.
"There are many prominent people who claim the main function of the brain is to compute input to output," Brembs said in a telephone interview.
COMPLEX ROBOTS
But what if there was no input, Brembs wondered.
He and colleagues devised an experiment with fruit flies in which they were deprived of all external stimuli.
Animals, and particularly insects, are often seen as complex robots, responding only to external stimuli, said Brembs, whose work appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One.
The researchers placed a single fruit fly in a pure white chamber -- devoid of visual cues. The fly was fixed in place and its attempts to turn were recorded. Researchers repeated their experiment on many flies and analyzed the data using a series of complex mathematical models.
What they found was surprising.
Lacking external input, Brembs said he had expected a pattern of entirely random movement or noise -- akin to static on a radio that is tuned between stations. Instead, the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random.
"The decision for the fly to turn left or turn right, which it changes all the time, has to come from the design of the brain," Brembs said.
Brembs said the finding reveals a mechanism that could form the biological basis of free will.
"I don't think we've found consciousness in the fruit fly," he said. "It's like one of the first building blocks, without which you can't go on."
George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who helped with the data analysis, said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature -- something typical of many biological processes.
"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.
"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.
He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.
"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.
-----------------
Do fruit flies have free will? www.eurekalert.org)
EurekAlert.org (May 15, 2007)
Scientists measure spontaneity in drosophila
Free will and true spontaneity exist ? in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
"Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Bj?rn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex brain." Using a combination of automated behavior recording and sophisticated mathematical analyses, the international team of researchers showed for the first time that such variability cannot be due to simple random events but is generated spontaneously and non-randomly by the brain. These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."
The researchers tethered fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in completely uniform white surroundings and recorded their turning behavior. In this setup, the flies do not receive any visual cues from the environment and since they are fixed in space, their turning attempts have no effect. Thus lacking any input, their behavior should resemble random noise, similar to a radio tuned between stations. However, the analysis showed that the temporal structure of fly behavior is very different from random noise. The researchers then tested a plethora of increasingly complex random computer models, all of which failed to adequately model fly behavior.
Only after the team analyzed the fly behavior with methods developed by co-authors George Sugihara and Chih-hao Hsieh from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego did they realize the origin of the fly's peculiar spontaneity. "We found that there must be an evolved function in the fly brain which leads to spontaneous variations in fly behavior" Sugihara said. "The results of our analysis indicate a mechanism which might be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will".
Our subjective notion of "Free Will" is an oxymoron: the term 'will' would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be 'free' if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity - which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie. "The question of whether or not we have free will appears to be posed the wrong way," says Brembs. "Instead, if we ask 'how close to free will are we"' one finds that this is precisely where humans and animals differ".
The next step will be to use genetics to localize and understand the brain circuits responsible for the spontaneous behavior. This step could lead directly to the development of robots with the capacity for spontaneous nonrandom behavior and may help combating disorders leading to compromised spontaneous behavioral variability in humans such as depression, schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder.
The research will appear in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
###
A few days ago, I left my bedroom?s window open to revel in the relatively cool breeze in an otherwise blistering hot and humid summer. The next day, I noticed in the living room a host of flies that apparently entered through the open window the other night. The flies would gather around the ravishing warmth of the light post in front of me. Startled and irritated, I crushed the frenzied flies to the wall, tactically, one by one.
A research article titled ?Order in Spontaneous Behavior? published in May 16, 2007 edition of the refereed science and medicine journal PLoS ONE www.plosone.org) presents some experimental evidence suggesting that fruit flies may have free will. A few news reports are posted below. More press coverage brembs.net). Researcher?s webpage brembs.net).
In my cat-and-mouse game with flies, what was quite interesting was that the more flies I killed, the more the other remaining flies would stay away from the light post. Did the flies learn that I would crush them to death if they came close to the light post? If so, was the altered response accompanied by the fly?s internal mental experience of free will? Is an ant or a fly a deterministic robot or an agent with free will? How about other insects and animals? If these creatures indeed have free will, then is their free will an expression of the brain?s neurochemistry alone, or a phenomenon that necessitates the existence of non-human ?souls?? The scrutinized fruit fly behavior might offer some interesting clues.
Nadeem
-----------------
Defending free will: A fruit fly makes choices brembs.net/sciam)
Julie Steenhuysen
Scientific American Science News (May 15, 2007)
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A tiny fruit fly -- without any input from the outside world -- will spontaneously change directions, researchers said on Monday in a finding that just may rescue the notion that free will not only exists but is a basic function of the brain.
"Neuroscientists have been claiming free will doesn't exist," said Bjorn Brembs, a neurobiologist of the Free University Berlin in Germany who led the study.
The claim is based on work in the 1980s by neuroscientist Benjamin Libet of University of California San Francisco, who discovered that even before a person made a conscious decision to move, the brain had already started the process of movement.
Neuroscientists say this so-called "readiness potential" suggests that the brain simply responds to outside stimuli, and consciousness is just the brain's way of rationalizing actions the brain has already determined to take.
"There are many prominent people who claim the main function of the brain is to compute input to output," Brembs said in a telephone interview.
COMPLEX ROBOTS
But what if there was no input, Brembs wondered.
He and colleagues devised an experiment with fruit flies in which they were deprived of all external stimuli.
Animals, and particularly insects, are often seen as complex robots, responding only to external stimuli, said Brembs, whose work appears in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS One.
The researchers placed a single fruit fly in a pure white chamber -- devoid of visual cues. The fly was fixed in place and its attempts to turn were recorded. Researchers repeated their experiment on many flies and analyzed the data using a series of complex mathematical models.
What they found was surprising.
Lacking external input, Brembs said he had expected a pattern of entirely random movement or noise -- akin to static on a radio that is tuned between stations. Instead, the flies showed a pattern of flight that was generated spontaneously by the brain and could not have been random.
"The decision for the fly to turn left or turn right, which it changes all the time, has to come from the design of the brain," Brembs said.
Brembs said the finding reveals a mechanism that could form the biological basis of free will.
"I don't think we've found consciousness in the fruit fly," he said. "It's like one of the first building blocks, without which you can't go on."
George Sugihara, a mathematical biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who helped with the data analysis, said the pattern of variability shown by the fly's choices revealed a non-linear signature -- something typical of many biological processes.
"We show free will 'can' exist, but we do not 'prove' it does," Sugihara said.
"Our results eliminate two alternative explanations of this spontaneous turning behavior that would run counter to free will, namely randomness and pure determinism," he said in an e-mail.
He said the results address the middle ground between simple determinism -- the brain as an input-output machine -- and utterly random behavior.
"We speculate that if free will exists, it is in this middle ground," he said.
-----------------
Do fruit flies have free will? www.eurekalert.org)
EurekAlert.org (May 15, 2007)
Scientists measure spontaneity in drosophila
Free will and true spontaneity exist ? in fruit flies. This is what scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
"Animals and especially insects are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external stimuli," says senior author Bj?rn Brembs from the Free University Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. "When scientists observe animals responding differently even to the same external stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex brain." Using a combination of automated behavior recording and sophisticated mathematical analyses, the international team of researchers showed for the first time that such variability cannot be due to simple random events but is generated spontaneously and non-randomly by the brain. These results caught computer scientist and lead author Alexander Maye from the University of Hamburg by surprise: "I would have never guessed that simple flies who otherwise keep bouncing off the same window have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance."
The researchers tethered fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) in completely uniform white surroundings and recorded their turning behavior. In this setup, the flies do not receive any visual cues from the environment and since they are fixed in space, their turning attempts have no effect. Thus lacking any input, their behavior should resemble random noise, similar to a radio tuned between stations. However, the analysis showed that the temporal structure of fly behavior is very different from random noise. The researchers then tested a plethora of increasingly complex random computer models, all of which failed to adequately model fly behavior.
Only after the team analyzed the fly behavior with methods developed by co-authors George Sugihara and Chih-hao Hsieh from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego did they realize the origin of the fly's peculiar spontaneity. "We found that there must be an evolved function in the fly brain which leads to spontaneous variations in fly behavior" Sugihara said. "The results of our analysis indicate a mechanism which might be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will".
Our subjective notion of "Free Will" is an oxymoron: the term 'will' would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be 'free' if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity - which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie. "The question of whether or not we have free will appears to be posed the wrong way," says Brembs. "Instead, if we ask 'how close to free will are we"' one finds that this is precisely where humans and animals differ".
The next step will be to use genetics to localize and understand the brain circuits responsible for the spontaneous behavior. This step could lead directly to the development of robots with the capacity for spontaneous nonrandom behavior and may help combating disorders leading to compromised spontaneous behavioral variability in humans such as depression, schizophrenia or obsessive compulsive disorder.
The research will appear in the May 16, 2007 issue of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.
###