Researchers have succeeded in controlling a group of beetles’ flight initiation, cessation, and elevation via stimulus of the brain which elicited, suppressed, or modulated wing oscillation¹.

The control system, mounted on the upper thorax, consisted of neural stimulators, muscular stimulators, a radio transceiver-equipped microcontroller, and a microbattery. After a series of electrical stimuli cause a beetle to take flight, no further stimulus is needed to maintain flight. Turns, triggered by directly stimulating the wing muscle on the side opposite the direction of the desired turn, were 75% successful. A stimulus to the brain can cause a descent of 60 cm on average, but only one electric pulse is required to cause a landing. Average trial flight time was only 45 seconds, but one flight persisted for more than half an hour.

Two species of beetle were used: Cotinus texana (a.k.a. green June beetles) from the southern U.S. and Mecynorrhina torquata from Africa. The difference between the two in response to stimulus was minimal but only the larger Mecynorrhina torquata (which can reach the size of a human palm) could handle the weight of the electronic gear and its battery well enough to fly freely under remote control.

The UC Berkeley engineers that created the cyborg insects were led by Michel Maharbiz and Hirotaka Sato. Their efforts were funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The project’s goal is to create insects that are completely remote-controlled and are able to perform such tasks as spying or looking for disaster survivors. However, in the short term it seems the research may be more helpful to biologists in understanding insect brains than in creating a battalion of cyborg spies.

What, if any, are the implications in this for the free will basis of action? Do parts of the human brain function similarly enough to the brain of insects for there to be any relevance in this to humans at all? What of apes and chimps? What empirical or theoretical (as opposed to conjectural) basis is there to suppose that humans are partly constituted by something that can rightly be called a will? It seems to me that the possibility of a remote-controlled human prompts us toward another order of skepticism alongside Cartesian skepticism and meaning skepticism: control skepticism. In other words, how can we know that we are in control of our own actions in any way—whether in the free will sense, merely in the sense that no one outside ourselves is controlling our actions, or an of the shades of grey in between?