Do Fruit Flies Have Free Will?
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
I think an experiment like this would also need to account for the fly's past experience and would need to control that to be exactly like another's.
It also needs to be temperature controlled (since most creatures come equipped with heat sensors) and even things like how quickly the fly flaps its wings can change conditions such as those (especially in such a tiny space).
It would seem as though the scientists were less trying to answer an age old philosophical problem and more trying to answer how predictable a fly is (i.e. how simple its decision process is).
Will does not apply. Garbage in garbage out.
I'm curious what kind of things tip you back and forth. I've been a staunch "undecided" for quite a while on this one.
My line of reasoning is that free will would appear to break causation and I'm not sure what the ramifications of that are in the grand scheme of things (i.e. magic?). I'm more inclined to think we're just an insanely complex chaotic system, but then what is consciousness really?
His way of reconciling determinism with free will goes something like this. Assuming determinism, then we are living in one of a huge number of possible universes. As limited intelligences, we have no way of figuring out exactly which history we live in, and so no way of accurately predicting the future. That's the free will we have -- the ability to 'play the game' and participate in this deterministic world, using our limited knowledge to try and understand what's going on; and how we can affect it, within the rules of physics.
Yes, this means that we don't have total free will in an unlimited fantastical sense; and, from the point of view of an all-knowing being who knows which history is the real one, all our actions are predetermined. But for all practical purposes, our participation as information-seeking, decision-making agents embedded in this elaborate ball game gives you all of the usual qualities that we worry losing with the loss of 'real' free will -- culpability for our actions, for example.
Even if you're not convinced by Dennett's position, the books do give useful ways of thinking about these problems, and go a long way towards removing the baggage that has accumulated around concepts of 'free will', 'determinism', 'responsibility', 'consciousness' and so on, so that one can reason about these ideas with more pragmatism.