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closeFruit Flies, Feeling and Doing
Posted by Harnad on 16 May 2007 at 11:31 GMT
Maye et al. have found a neurally (and genetically) based fractal order underlying the generation of spontaneous behavior. Their finding is undoubtedly important in understanding the mechanisms generating adaptive behavior and the authors have been cautious in their interpretations within the article, but less so in discussions with the press.
One co-author writes: "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 findings actually have nothing to do with free will. Free will is a feeling I have (when I do something deliberately) that I am doing what I am doing because I feel like it: a feeling that my willing it is the cause of my doing it.
It is undeniably true that that is what it feels like to do something deliberately. But whether what feels like the cause -- feeling -- is indeed the cause of my doing is an entirely different matter. The real cause might, for example, be a fractal order mechanism of the kind reported by Maye et al. But that mechanism is the causal mechanism it is irrespective of whether it happens to be accompanied by (or generates) feelings. And it certainly does not explain how or why we (let alone the fruit fly) feel anything at all.
And without feeling there is no free will, just mechanisms, whether deterministic or nondeterministic -- unless we are ready to believe in telekinesis.
Stevan Harnad
Harnad, S. (2003) Can a Machine Be Conscious? How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 10(4-5): 69-75. http://eprints.ecs.soton....
RE: Fruit Flies, Feeling and Doing
BjoernBrembs replied to Harnad on 23 May 2007 at 12:40 GMT
Of course, our original study very deliberately makes no mention of free will. However, the discovery of 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?"
Of course, some media dropped that question mark, because questions don't sell. A few journalists even told me their editors advised them to emphasize the free will thing precisely for this reason.
As you correctly point out, our study has indeed little to do with the subjective notion of free will, because the nonlinearity we find evidence for is not necessarily the process by which our conscious decisions take place. However, not everybody would see the definition of free will so narrow. Free will commonly entails not only the subjective notion of willing to do something, but also that nobody but myself would be able to predict my behavior. For instance, Greene and Cohen (2004, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 359, 1775–1785, doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1546) expect that advancing neuroscience will one day be able to predict individual human behavior to an accuracy of about 95%. Our study shows that such a high confidence is hardly achievable in individual flies. We speculate that humans are not more, but even less predictable than fruit flies.
Along those lines, in the Behavioral Sciences one may therefore want to define free will a little differently. For an individual to possess free will, it would only require that: (1) all of the causes of the behavior are intra-individual and (2) the individual's behaviors are not predictable (within a level of scientific certainty) by someone else who is extra-individual. It is not that difficult to satisfy both requirements, depending on how certain of the above terms are defined.
This definition explicitly does not touch the subjective feeling of free will, which I think is an advantage. This definition would allow for a conversion of free will from a philosophical question to a biological study area. The subjective experience of free will would then, consequentially, fall into the topic of consciousness.