One for the philosophers
Offered without comment, from New Scientist:
“Fruit flies have free will. Even when deprived of any sensory input to react to, the zigs and zags of their flight reveal an intrinsic, non-random - yet still unpredictable - decision-making capacity.
If evolution has furnished humans with a similar capacity, this could help resolve one of the long-standing puzzles of philosophy.
Science assumes that effects have causes, and that if we understand the causes well enough we can predict the effects. But if so, our experience of being free to make choices is an illusion, since we are in effect just sophisticated robots responding to stimuli. If our behaviour is unpredictable, this is only because random events prevent us from responding perfectly to our environment.”
License
This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 England & Wales License.
May 17th, 2007 at 10:51 pm
So what if we are just sophisticated robots? Sophisticated robots can make choices.
Also, you might like OnlinePhilosophyClub.com.