...If people actually don't have free will, punishing a natural machine which couldn't be otherwise makes no sense. Harmful people should be removed from society, for society's protection, but not punished, driven into debt, etc.
#society #freedom #freewill #choice #behaviour #nature #einstein #biology #buddhism #complexsystem #complexadaptivesystem #determinism #causality #crime #punishment #prison
Many societies operate on the assumption people have free will/choice over their behaviours, but, if one could view the universe on a large enough scale, both Einstein, some biologists, and Buddhism say the system overall is deterministic, meaning, though complex, people are actually natural automata/machines.
#society #freedom #freewill #choice #behaviour #nature #einstein #biology #buddhism #complexsystem #complexadaptivesystem #determinism #karma #kamma #dependentorigination #causality
Survival depends on avoiding threats, a process shaped by experience and internal states. Notably, acute stress can induce analgesia, yet the neural mechanisms by which stress alters aversive value coding remain unclear. Using Drosophila, we show that prior noxious experience induces intensity-dependent analgesia and triggers the release of CO2, a known stress signal. Surprisingly, this effect is mediated by tracheal dendrite (td) neurons in the respiratory system rather than classic olfactory pathways. We then demonstrated that activation of td neurons induces analgesia, whereas their inhibition suppresses it and restores normal nocifensive and learned behavior. Finally, high CO2 exposure decreases dopaminergic neuron responses to electric shocks, thereby impairing aversive memory formation. Together, we propose that under hypercapnic (high CO2) stress, td neurons modulate nociceptive computation and aversive value coding in the brain to facilitate appropriate innate and learned behavioral responses. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Agence Nationale de la Recherche, https://ror.org/00rbzpz17, ANR-24-CE92-0014-01, ANR-21-CE16-0015-01 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 545515202
Book Review: The Mind is Flat by Nick Chater | Forget all about the Freudian ID, Super-ego and Ego vying for your present attention. And forget about Jungian archetypes and stuff randomly bubbling up to the surface of your consciousness. According to Behavioural Psychologist Nick Chater – this doesn’t exist. Instead, what we all have is a flat mind! #NickChater #BookReview #Bookstodon #Psychology #Behaviour
http://contentcatnip.com/2020/01/16/book-review-the-mind-is-flat-by-nick-chater/
The maternal microbiome during oogenesis is a critical but underappreciated regulator of offspring physiology. Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model, we show that a single, transient antibiotic exposure during oogenesis, without direct offspring exposure, is sufficient to reprogram larval behaviour, gene expression, and metabolism. Adult flies exposed to either ciprofloxacin or vancomycin produced third-instar larvae with significantly reduced crawling speed and a significantly higher prevalence of abnormal locomotion. Transcriptomic profiling revealed widespread downregulation of genes governing energy metabolism, particularly the tricarboxylic acid cycle, as well as cuticle development and protein folding. Metabolomic profiling identified elevation of L-norvaline across both antibiotic groups, and acute parental supplementation with L-norvaline alone recapitulated the observed crawling deficits, directly implicating this metabolite in the phenotype. These findings demonstrate that even brief disruption of the microbiome during oogenesis triggers a cascade of intergenerational physiological changes, establishing this window as a key period of microbiome-dependent offspring programming. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 101001355
Electron-microscopy reconstruction now yields complete synaptic wiring diagrams, or connectomes, of entire small brains, including the larval Drosophila, the first insect brain reconstructed in full. How far a wiring diagram alone fixes a circuit's activity, as opposed to the finer physiological detail it does not record, is debated. We run a complete connectome as a fixed, rate-based dynamical operator in which no single-neuron parameter is fitted, so that, at one fixed dynamical regime, the model's behavior reflects the wiring and its connection strengths rather than tuned single-neuron physiology, and compare it against a hierarchy of randomized networks that each preserve a coarser description of the wiring. The model's overall dynamical regime, how strongly and how richly it responds, is mostly statistical: networks keeping only the connectome's coarse wiring statistics reproduce it. The wiring beyond these statistics instead sets where activity travels and which circuits shape it. Sparse input is confined to a compact olfactory pathway that randomized networks flood, and the mushroom body, the insect learning center, takes an outsized role in the leading adjoint-side modes, the directions that weigh which neurons shape the recurrent dynamics. Coarse statistics set the regime; the precise pattern of connections sets the geometry, a separation that clarifies which connectome-based claims rest on wiring alone.
Anagārika Alāra, PhD
flypapers
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