The Fly

Beautiful, innit? The brain of a fruit fly, showing neurons (~ 140,000) color coded by the circuit they operate in. See the full report here.

The entire brain of a fruit fly is no larger than a sesame seed. This is a breathtaking accomplishment, about a decade in the making. I mean c’mon, you don’t need to be a neuroscientist to have your mind blown by this. Better yet, read the report and you’ll see the scientists, having captured the full map of the fly brain, used it to create a virtual brain which they then installed in a virtual fly. Then they stimulated the specific neurons that sense a sugar taste, and viola! the toy fly’s proboscis (nose) extended toward the sensation, just like the proboscis would on a real fly intending to feed. As if that weren’t cool enough, they then figured out the specific neuronal pathways involved in sensing sugar on both the right side and left side of the proboscis, different pathways. And here’s what they found

The simulated brain did what a real brain would: It commanded the proboscis to stick out so that the fly could eat. And if the virtual fly tasted sugar only on the right side of its proboscis, the brain sent commands to bend it toward the right.

And you know what they didn’t find? Not a spec of evidence for a “conductor” of the fly’s thoughts. Imagine that – a brain that animates its host all by itself. The heresy!

And below is the animated 3-D image. See the article for the toy fly in action. More of this please, scientists 😉

People, I beseech you, that’s A LOT of interconnected ganglia to make a fruit fly work, no? Think about this next time you carelessly swat and kill one.

5 thoughts on “The Fly”

  1. Rod, your suggestion in “The Fly”;

    “People, I beseech you, that’s A LOT of interconnected ganglia to make a fruit fly work, no? Think about this next time you carelessly swat and kill one.”;

    negates the premise of your previous post to this post where you suggest moral judgement is pointless.

    Your posts posit a deterministic and mechanistic worldview where the killing of a fly, or a human being for that matter, are neither here nor there in a world where there are no permanent standards to which to refer and moral judgement is pointless, as you suggest.

    As a wise man once said, “As long as you have discovered no values which deserve to go on beyond death, annihilation is a boon and not a curse.” If that is indeed the case, you’re doing the fly a favor by swatting it, and the same would go for a human being.

  2. Hi John. Good to hear from you. I hope you and yours are well.

    Moral judgment goes out the window under the thesis of hard determinism, but secular value judgements of good and bad don’t.

    If someone strikes me in the face or takes my wallet, those actions are incrementally bad for me wrt my flourishing. If someone provides me water before I die from thirst, that is incrementally good wrt my flourishing.

    But neither one of those people (brains) deserves moral judgement under the thesis that they could not have acted otherwise.

    (Likewise for the fly. My awe for its biological complexity bled into my sympathy centers. I’d intended it as a lighthearted comment.).

    Back to humans then – perhaps you’re thinking, No justice for the bad actor?

    Of course, we (society) could act to stop actions, present and future, directed at us that are bad wrt our flourishing, and express our approval for the good ones. No question. Even the most committed determinist would advocate serial killers be removed from society, but I expect (would hope) the advocacy for that position would be based on secular reasoning wrt human flourishing and be consistent with the conclusions of modern neuroscience.

    Btw, I want to quibble with your assertion that I possess a “mechanistic” view of the world. I’m a committed materialist, yes, but I make no claim as to how the brain precisely works to produce consciousness or the experience of its own thoughts. And I feel like I’m in good company there.

  3. Good Morning, Rod. I appreciate your response. Me and mine are all well, thank you, and my visits here strongly suggest you and yours are also. Excellent!

    While I appreciate your thoughts on secular judgements not being out the window, at least you hope, in and of themselves secular judgements carry little weight, whether societally or individually, as society is simply a mental construct and it does not exist except as a group of individuals of like minded interests. And because each individual arrives at courses of action based on their own individual self interests, without an ultimate arbiter of permanent standards to refer to, well, the evidence of actions around the world clearly show that the well being the theory of materialism posits is without merit.

    In regards to my stating that your thinking suggests that you also embrace a mechanistic world view in addition to deterministic, I contend that both theories are closely intertwined, though there are nuances. Neither theories seem to recognize that it is our human intellect which gave rise to the theories, and not mere naturally occurring events throughout history.

    Granted, the material world has provided us with many, many aspects of well being, comfort, but without human beings’ controlling intelligence, we’d remain merely another animal with no higher thought than to obtain our next meal.

  4. I think you misunderstood what I meant. Materialism refers to an epistemic approach for understanding things in the real world, including how biology works. It’s opposed fundamentally to dualism, so-called God-in-the-gaps explanations, which all rely in one form or another on “invisible essences” to support their supernatural “theories” of mind. Scientific materialism has nothing to do with “positing theories of well-being.”

    Obviously, there are many societies in the world right now that are fucked up (our own isn’t immune), but it’s not because the science of materialism is wrong. If anything, it’s because too many people in the world are dualists who think their moral beliefs are superior to others, and are all too eager to kill other people who disagree with them. How did this come to be? What happened to the “arbiter of permanent standards?”

    1. Afternoon, Rod. I think I did not adequately respond or explain my view on materialism, no matter if it is scientific, philosophical, or what flavor a materialist may tend to. While materialism can explain many aspects of the material world, it cannot explain consciousness or intellect, nor will man be able to invent instruments of precision to define or measure intellect. Certainly there are IQ tests and brain wave measuring instruments, but these are imprecise tools not instruments of precision.

      As to the dualism problem you note, yes, this is a stumbling block to individuals throughout the world and often acted upon with hate and malice. How did this come to be, you ask, though I am unable to answer that definitively; I’m far from being a final arbiter; history suggests, across cultures and beliefs, that the hate and malice arises from men eager to consolidate control and power over peoples. Even Christian men and cultures, unfortunately are prone to this problem. I firmly believe in The Creator, or God in the vernacular, as the final arbiter and any individual who judges and kills based on their own human initiative and judgement is not acting in a manner that The Messiah would approve of.

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