From boingboing.net: Fruit flies and Free Will

First post at Boingboing.net: Matt sez, "A researcher at my University is working on modeling the behaviour of fruit flies. Turns out they have something like a Free Will, or at least they are not completely random in their flying patterns. Check out the video of drosophila in the flight simulator."

Their 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 keep bouncing off the same window otherwise have the capacity for nonrandom spontaneity if given the chance.” Previous studies have shown that in nature, flies do not buzz about aimlessly but forage according to a sophisticated search strategy (this is how they find our wine glasses). The new research now suggests that such strategies arise spontaneously rather than being induced by spatial cues.

Free will is seen in choices. Let's say you're given options A, B and C. Therefore, option A, B and C are pre-determined and offered by Grand Omnipotent Designer, the Unseen Systems Architect, the Super User, God as we know it. But instead of one of those 3 options, you come up and implement Option D. That's free will. The freedom to take on a gamble, and decide on a particular course of action, fate, if you will. It could be that Option D had been all along been pre-determined by God in some massive supercomputing mind of His, but the person knows it not, he has to take a gamble. He has to risk to know, to experience, to encounter and possibly die from the venture. That's free will. Free Will is therefore a Gamble.

Now to study free will, you can either study the aggregate actions of people or study it at the rudimentary basic level. The world of insects for example.

All along we thought Animals are basically ingenious, complex but highly useful robots. Given X, they perform Y; up to a certain tolerance and within a certain scope of operation. A goat can't breathe underwater, nor can a fish fly. But do animals have free will? Do they make choices other than that we offer them? If so how can we say that their choices are not simply random events? How can we imply, from the data, that the actions we see is not an aberrant behaviour?

One of the ways we can do that is to capture the data of movement in flight by insects and apply a statistical function to determine if this action is random or not.

Here's the link to the fruitfly study: http://brembs.net/spontaneous/

Excerpt from article:

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. Using the so-called "S-Map Procedure" the researchers detected a non-linear signature in the fly behavior. Such a signature can only be found in systems whose indeterminate behavior is not due to noise but originates in their design. “This signature indicates that there is a function in the fly brain which evolved to generate spontaneous variations in the behavior” Sugihara said. “This function appears to be common to many other animals and could form the biological foundation for what we experience as free will”.

Its kinda nice to know that free will exists and that in the end we still have choices in our life. What is wealth, money, brains, beauty and brawn or even good health, if we don't have freedom and the will to use it.