Free Will in Fruit Flies

Many people forwarded me a link to this story titled “Study Hints that Fruit Flies Have Free Will.” It gave me a good laugh.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016/?GT1=9951

My favorite part is where the scientist speculates that if free will exists, it is in the middle ground between randomness and determinism.

Huh?

That sounds a lot like halfway between orange and three. You can’t pick any two things and speculate that there’s something sensible in the middle. This is your first clue that there’s some fuzzy thinking going on here.

So the researchers glued a fruit fly to a hook in a totally white environment to see if he reacted randomly, since there were no environmental cues to guide him. The fly acted non-randomly. This non-random action is labeled “spontaneous” by the researchers who then conclude they’ve made some sort of headway toward understanding free will in humans.

Um. . . What happened to determinism?

The most likely explanation for the test results is that fruit fly behavior is predetermined, just like the rest of the universe, but too complicated to predict, even when you constrain a few variables. The test ruled out randomness, but it never addressed determinism. And determinism is where the smart money is, say Spinoza and Einstein, for example.

According to many of the readers of this blog, free will is somehow connected to randomness. So for you folks, the fruit fly test actually struck a blow to the possibility of free will by showing that fruit flies don’t appear to have random behavior.

I guess the headline about the existence of free will seemed better than their first choice: “Study Shows Fruit Flies Look Around Even When There’s Not Much to Look At.”

Comments

[Thad Guy]

Free will is often quite poorly defined. Some say free will is when they are able to make choices based upon their own desires. This sort of free will would be compatible with a deterministic world. However, there are those who call the 'choosing based on desires' camp fools and dance around talking about how free will is really having the ability to do otherwise. This second view is not compatible with a deterministic world.

On some level the very concept of free will may be contradictory. However, I have discovered it is easier to make fun of it than to find the contradiction.

http://www.thadguy.com/comic/some-things-cant-be-forced/93/

[Mikael]

It's nice to get confirmation from one of the authors that I didn't misrepresent their work (I'm guessing here that the reference wasn't to Desi Cunins comment, although it was also on the spot :). I'm just a Computer scientist, and not very well versed in statistics nor in models of brain behaviour.

[Rob]

why should something with no external stimulus behave randomly? and if not why does that indicate free will. i could build a robot to fly in any pattern i wished in a darkenned room

[Tim]

Weather patterns are not random, they are extreemly complex but are interactive with the environment. If they were completely random it would snow in the sahara.

[Bjoern Brembs]

Wow, our work got blogged by the Dilbert blog! What an honor.
http://brembs.net/spontaneous

Actually, it's quite easy to get something that's in-between random and deterministic. Go and read the original paper and you'll understand. :-)
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000443
Commenter #2 also got it: Desi Cunin.

Oh and the weather (great analogy!) has stable laws of physics which make it chaotic. The brain can (and does!) constantly change the connectivity between the neurons that make up the non-linearity. Which, therefore, is where the otherwise very useful weather-brain analogy ends.
Cheers,
Bjoern

[Bjoern Brembs]

Wow, our work got blogged by the Dilbert blog! What an honor.
http://brembs.net/spontaneous

Actually, it's quite easy to get something that's in-between random and deterministic. Go and read the original paper and you'll understand. :-)
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000443
Commenter #2 also got it: Desi Cunin.

The weather (great analogy!) has stable laws of physics which make it chaotic. The brain can (and does!) constantly change the connectivity between the neurons that make up the non-linearity. Which, therefore, is where the otherwise very useful weather-brain analogy ends.
Cheers,
Bjoern

[Bjoern Brembs]

Wow, our work got blogged by the Dilbert blog! What an honor.
http://brembs.net/spontaneous

Actually, it's quite easy to get something that's in-between random and deterministic. Go and read the original paper and you'll understand. :-)
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0000443
Commenter #2 also got it: Desi Cunin.

The weather (great analogy!) has stable laws of physics which make it chaotic. The brain can (and does!) constantly change the connectivity between the neurons that make up the non-linearity. Which, therefore, is where the otherwise very useful weather-brain analogy ends.
Cheers,
Bjoern

[Scott Alan Miller]

Maybe someone should explain to the researches that they can't just will free will into existence.

Or can they?

[Desi Cunin]

If I were glued to a hook, I'd behave oddly too.

[Mikael]

As usual, the media completely misrepresented a scientific article. Reading the actual article, the authors just conclude that in contrast to common notions of determinism + simple random model, the fruit flies exhibited decidedly non-simple random behaviour. The flight patterns approximately followed a fractal distribution, which makes sense from a utility perspective (when nothing else is known, do a decent non-guided search).

The article is available for free (under the Creative commons attribution 2.5 license) at http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0000443.

[Suhrid]

Time flies like wind,
Fruit flies like bananas ...

[Oli]

I have to disagree on this one, with no stimuli yes the fly looked around, but there is no constraining factor determining where he flies. There was no hook, simply a fly in a box with all external stimulii removed. Personally I think free will must exist, why else would I do so much that actually harms my body?

http://ramblingsofanofficeworker.blogspot.com

[gr8hands]

latsot, the fact you and Scott use the vocabulary of free will (choose, learn, reassess, etc.) demonstrates you believe in it. If you did not believe it was possible for you to make choices, it would be incredibly illogical and stupid for you to say you "chose" something.

Unless you can't comprehend that. It's like sending me a blog stating that you don't believe in the Internet -- internally inconsistent and really silly.

Who's the idiot?

[Juryu]

Although I kind of agree with you, you don't have to compare "randomness vs. determinism" with "orange vs. three". Randomness is the opposite of determininsm, while orange and three are unrelated. You CAN speculate about something in the middle of two opposites. Like black and while - there's gray, right in the middle.

Again, although I kind of agree with you, I think it just weakens your point when you say something silly like that.

[latsot]

"The fact that you use vocabulary expressing those concepts is de facto proof that you also believe in free will and are exhibiting it."

Yes, you are quite right - this is the most convincing argument I've ever heard. I'm really going to have to reassess my core beliefs now.

Idiot.

[latsot]

"The fact that you use vocabulary expressing those concepts is de facto proof that you also believe in free will and are exhibiting it."

Yes, you are quite right - this is the most convincing argument I've ever heard. I'm really going to have to reassess my core beliefs now.

Idiot.

[Tom]

They seem to be saying that the fly has some kind of internal entropy generator. So as you say, the actions are predetermined, just too complex to predict.

[regret]

im not gonna hurt myself thinking about it but to me consciousness is what you get when you combine chaos with an information feedbackloop, as in thinking about what you thought(isn't that called philosophy? :P). soo weather isn't conscious and because of this weather does not have freewill.

scott... GO!

[gr8hands]

Scott, latsot, and many others,

If you do not believe in "free will" then there are no real choices, no acheivements, no creativity, only reactions. It means no consciousness, no "I" or sense of self, and certainly no capability to learn anything.

The fact that you use vocabulary expressing those concepts is de facto proof that you also believe in free will and are exhibiting it.

But of course there are no exceptions to this particular scenario.

[ebay typos]

quote: "Half way bewtween Orange and Three? Well, they're both mobile phone networks, so I'm guessing the answer is... T-Mobile?" That is a good point. U couldn't have picked two more unrandom things lol.

[TallDave]

Your post gave me a good laugh. Sounds like you didn't understand the experiment.

"The most likely explanation for the test results is that fruit fly behavior is predetermined, just like the rest of the universe, but too complicated to predict"

Wrong. We already know via quantum mechanics that outcomes are not deterministic. That's where randomness comes in.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~jas/one/freewill-theorem.html

But simply behaving randomly wouldn't be free will; directed nonpredictability is not the same as randomness.

It's a silly game to define free will as something that can't by definition exist and then attempt to disprove it.

[bored]

yawn

[Kilgore J. Trout]

And solid objects contain moving electrons. The physical property described would be half way between yellow and 2.

[Factoring Canada]

I saw the article. It's hard to jump at conclusions without reading the actual experiment. Why? Experiments like this probably have all sorts of complexities that can't be reduced to two or three paragraphs os snappy copy and soundbytes without loosing serious meat.

[A.]

Here's the problem I have with your argument. Essentially, I don't disagree with it at all. It's very well thought out, and you tend to do a very good job supporting it.

But you are so completely obnoxious about it. Of course some people disagree with you, and to the degree that I do, for example, I am being informed by a spiritual understanding of the universe, which is not rationally defensible and does not need to be in order to be valid. When you treat the belief in free will as proof of being a complete blithering idiot, you are just alienating people. I used to read your blog much more often, but your excessive righteousness on this issue is really very annoying.

Especially ridiculous (and leading me to stop reading for weeks) was the line that anyone disagreeing with you first had to explain why he was smarter than Einstein. It's not even necessary to address how pretentious that is, or how insulting that is to people who disagree with you. Just because I believe in something that science won't prove doesn't make a person an idiot, any more than believing in infinitely divisible space or finitely divisible space. On this issue, Einstein had a particular belief, one that was not shared by all scientists of his time or now. Einstein didn't believe in some of the main features of quantum mechanics. He was brilliant, but his beliefs were colored to a degree by his experiences and his mental limits. Is the man who thinks quantum mechanics accurately describe our world also an idiot?