We've gone this far so we might as well wrap up this fly paper.
10. The self and agency
In contrast to consciousness, an important part of a scientific concept of free will is the concept of ‘self’. It is important to realize that the organism generates an action itself, spontaneously. In chemistry, spontaneous reactions occur when there is a chemical imbalance. The system is said to be far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Biological organisms are constantly held far from equilibrium, they are considered open thermodynamic systems. However, in contrast to physical or chemical open systems, some of the spontaneous actions initiated by biological organisms help keep the organism away from equilibrium. Every action that promotes survival or acquires energy sustains the energy flow through the open system, prompting Georg Litsche to define biological organisms as a separate class of open systems (i.e. ‘subjects’; [101]). Because of this constant supply of energy, it should not be surprising to scientists that actions can be initiated spontaneously and need not be released by external stimuli. In controlled situations where there cannot be sufficient causes outside the organism to make the organism release the particular action, the brain initiates behaviour from within, potentially using a two-stage process as described above. The boy ceases to play and jumps up. This sort of impulsivity is a characteristic of children every parent can attest to. We do not describe the boy's action with ‘some hidden stimuli made him jump’—he jumped of his own accord. The jump has all the qualities of a beginning. The inference of agency in ourselves, others and even inanimate objects is a central component of how we think. Assigning agency requires a concept of self. How does a brain know what is self?
One striking characteristic of actions is that an animal normally does not respond to the sensory stimuli it causes by its own actions.
"normally"
The best examples are that it is difficult to tickle oneself and that we do not perceive the motion stimuli caused by our own eye saccades or the darkness caused by our eye blinks.
What about the best counter example?
The basic distinction between self-induced (re-afferent) and externally generated (ex-afferent) sensory stimuli has been formalized by von Holst & Mittelstaedt [102]. The two physiologists studied hoverflies walking on a platform surrounded by a cylinder with black and white vertical stripes. As long as the cylinder was not rotated, the animals seemed to behave as if they were oblivious to the stripes. However, as soon as the cylinder was switched on to rotate around the flies, the animals started to turn in register with the moving stripes, in an attempt to stabilize their orientation with respect to the panorama. Clearly, when the animals turned themselves, their eyes perceived the same motion stimuli as when the cylinder was rotated. The two scientists concluded that the animals detect which of these otherwise very similar motion signals are generated by the flies and which are not and dubbed this the ‘principle of reafference’. To test the possibility that the flies just blocked all visual input during self-initiated locomotion, the experimenters glued the heads of the animals rotated by 180° such that the positions of the left and right eye were exchanged and the proboscis pointed upwards. Whenever these ‘inverted’ animals started walking in the stationary striped cylinder, they ran in constant, uncontrollable circles, showing that they did perceive the relative motion of the surround. From this experiment, von Holst and Mittelstaedt concluded that self-generated turning comes with the expectation of a visual motion signal in the opposite direction that is perceived but normally does not elicit a response. If the visual motion signal is not caused by the animal, on the other hand, it most probably requires compensatory action, as this motion was not intended and hence not expected. The principle of reafference is the mechanism by which we realize which portion of the incoming sensory stream is under our own control and which portion is not. This is how we distinguish between those sensory stimuli that are consequences of our own actions and those that are not. Distinguishing self from ‘world’ is the prerequisite for the evolution of separate learning mechanisms for self- and world learning, respectively [43], which is the central principle of how brains balance actions and responses. The self/world distinction is thus the second important function of behavioural variability, besides making the organism harder to predict: by using the sensory feedback from our actions, we are constantly updating our model of how the environment responds to our actions. Animals and humans constantly ask: What happens if I do this? The experience of willing to do something and then successfully doing it is absolutely central to developing a sense of self and that we are in control (and not being controlled).
Thus, in order to understand actions, it is necessary to introduce the term self. The concept of self necessarily follows from the insight that animals and humans initiate behaviour by themselves. It would make no sense to assign a behaviour to an organism if any behavioural activity could, in principle, be traced back by a chain of causations to the origin of the universe. An animal or human being is the agent causing a behaviour, as long as no sufficient causes for this activity to occur are coming from outside the organism. Agency is assigned to entities who initiate actions themselves. Agency is crucial for moral responsibility. Behaviour can have good or bad consequences. It is the agent for whom the consequences matter the most and who can be held responsible for them.
Maybe we're getting close to finding out what moral responsibility fruit flies have.
Are we going to have to treat them with love and compassion too - usually I just swat at the little buggers.
I like to imagine ...
by 
Hmmm this must be the editorial section of the scientific paper.
makes me think we should limit moral responsibility to humans.
for Björn Brembs paper?