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LostInParadise's avatar

Do animals have random behavior generators?

How does an ant or a bee decide on what direction to choose for foraging? There may not be any good reason to choose one over another. Imagine a rabbit using a zigzag pattern to evade a pursuing fox. How does the rabbit know when and how to change direction? If the fox could figure it out, the evasive strategy would lose its effectiveness. It does not seem to make sense to speak of free will in these cases, but it would be useful to have some means of randomly choosing an action. Do you think there may be circuitry in an animals brain to make random decisions? I can’t imagine an animal ever being indecisive or doing the equivalent of creating a spreadsheet and weighing pluses and minuses. Their actions always seem spontaneous.

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