A few weeks ago, Lars Chittka invited me to write an article "about free will in insects" for a Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences) Special Feature on 'Information processing in miniature brains' that he is editing. Given our work on spontaneity in flies and my mentor being Martin Heisenberg, how could I decline?

I think I will first give a very brief overview of what people used to call "free will" and why it was such a controversy. I hope to get the gist across in about two paragraphs. Much of this info will be distilled from Bob Doyle's website and his article in William James Studies. Bob also published a letter to Nature in response to Martin Heisenberg's article there. Is it just coincidence that it was Heisenberg's father Werner Heisenberg who discovered the uncertainty principle?

Then I plan to go on to argue that today the old, metaphysical free will of course does not exist in the almost 'spiritual' sense and that no prominent scholar has entertained that idea at least since Popper and Eccles' book "The self and its brain" in 1977. Instead, I will try and make the case that the term "free will" should be recast in biological terms, as a trait that evolved and keeps evolving to different degrees in different animals. I plan to use evidence from flies, leeches and other invertebrate animals to emphasize that even so-called 'simple' brains possess the capacity to behave unpredictably, i.e., freely. Any difference in freedom between animals is merely gradual.

I probably should also spend a paragraph or so elaborating on the selection pressures leading to spontaneous behaviors and behavioral variability.

Once the capacity for freedom has been shown, it will take less work convincing the readers of the capacity to 'will'.

All of this should be couched in the notion that the dichotomy between indeterminism and determinism is a false dichotomy, because brains operate in the gray area between the two. This may be the most difficult concept to grasp, that indeterminism and determinism are not mutually exclusive, but delineate a spectrum of what one may call 'probabilism'. I may try and refer to evolution as also using both concepts of mutation (indeterminate) and selection (determinate) in a probabilistic process. I may even try and refer to Bayesian Statistics, although I know little more than the basic idea behind it. The main task of this section will be to argue that what we call freedom is more than just chance. Chance, or randomness is a prerequisite for freedom, a necessary component but it's not sufficient. Let me quote from our press release at the time: If after all that there's still room in the article, I'll review some of the data on the human default mode network and what they might contribute to the debate.

Let's see, if enough people express interest in the comments, I may put a draft version online for comments and review. All commenters will at least be mentioned in the acknowledgements, of course.

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Heisenberg, M. (2009). Is free will an illusion? Nature, 459 (7244), 164-165 DOI: 10.1038/459164a
Doyle, R. (2009). Free will: it's a normal biological property, not a gift or a mystery Nature, 459 (7250), 1052-1052 DOI: 10.1038/4591052c
Briggman, K. (2005). Optical Imaging of Neuronal Populations During Decision-Making Science, 307 (5711), 896-901 DOI: 10.1126/science.1103736
Maye, A., Hsieh, C., Sugihara, G., & Brembs, B. (2007). Order in Spontaneous Behavior PLoS ONE, 2 (5) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000443