So the [[VP882 MP3 player]] works well. But it’s haunted.

I created a ‘Flamenco’ play list, which, as you could have guessed, contains mostly Flamenco. Well, once in a while, the MP3 player just spontaneously start to play that play-list, starting in the middle of a seemingly random song.

On a (not) totally unrelated note, a [[study

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016/?GT1=9951]] hints that fruit flies have free will. Free will is a funny topic which biggest use is to get Scott Adam’s [[blog

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/]]’s readers worked up. Some people’s opinion is that the world is all deterministic and all, so free will is an illusion. And yes, there is quantum physics that introduces randomness, but then you’d be arguing that your free will is the same as acting randomly. The other people’s opinion is that we have freedom of choice.

Well, as for me, I’ll let the jury out until someone has properly defined what ‘free will’ means. ‘The ability to make a choice’ is only a valid answer if you define ‘choice’, and detail how alternatives are available to us, and how the brain decides between the alternatives.

Back to that article: scientists put a fruit fly in a completely featureless room, expecting the fly to act randomly because it had nothing to base its choices on. Instead, the fly always goes flying around following a well-known algorithm. Somehow, the scientists (or the journalist) deduced that that meant even fruit flies have free will. I am too dim to understand the reasoning: apparently, following a known, predictable algorithm is the same as free will.

Now the interesting thing is the very long argument about how, if a fly can spontaneously ‘decide’ to follow a strategy, it must have free will.

Wait. What was that about spontaneously? But… my MP3 player spontaneously plays stuff, without having been told, in an unpredictable way! I’ve created a machine that possesses free will! Go me!

That, or it’s just haunted.