Free Will Reduced to Brain Circuitry
16 May 2007 by keithwerner
Free will and true spontaneity exist … in fruit flies. This is what
scientists report in a groundbreaking study in the May 16, 2007 issue
of the open-access journal PLoS ONE.“Animals and especially insects
are usually seen as complex robots which only respond to external
stimuli,” says senior author Björn Brembs from the Free University
Berlin. They are assumed to be input-output devices. “When scientists
observe animals responding differently even to the same external
stimuli, they attribute this variability to random errors in a complex
brain.”
Those are the first two paragraphs from an article titled “Do fruit flies have free will?” at physorg.com. The bottom line of the reported research seems to be that fruit flies have some circuitry in their brains that generates what the scientists call “spontaneous variations in fly behavior” and that such circuitry in brains generally could be the “biological foundation for what we experience as free will.” I’m curious what philosophers and theologians will make of a fully biological explanation for free will, if that is what emerges from this research.
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