( he fly's peculiar spontaneity. We foun...)Do fruit flies have free will?

he 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.

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Source:Public Library of Science


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