There is no such thing as free will. DETERMINISM! *high five*

*high five*

Whoa, wait a minute. The fly essentially leaves its behavior up to a coin flip. This is not free will. It's chance.

*high five*

Charlies, where's the free will? Instinctive responses are selected for when probabilities of death are high, and it's better to have zero will involved in that. As for choosing randomly... is that will? or just blind motion?

This is a general property of models. If a model is inadequate to describe behavior or the experiment does not observe enough variables, adding stochastic noise usually provides a better "fit" in a statistical sense. This may say nothing more than that the deterministic portion of the model is inadequate.

as for the philosophical dumbfuck mistake of equating random chance with free will, see Hume, or failing that Patricia Churchland who explains Hume in terms that people who are overly impressed by puff pieces mentioning "brain" can understand.

Just paging through the Phil Trans Roy Soc B piece, damn what incompetent philosophy.

--grumpy neurobiologist

"Just paging through the Phil Trans Roy Soc B piece, damn what incompetent philosophy."

Read the article and you will see there is no philosophy.

Bjoern Brembs

"Just paging through the Phil Trans Roy Soc B piece, damn what incompetent philosophy."

Read the article and you will see there is no philosophy.

Bjoern Brembs