Is there such a thing as choice ?

[theVOID]

Pretty simply, who we are is made up of two things: nature, and nurture.

Nature is the information already encoded in our DNA: from our height to our skin color to our propensity to fall victim to addiction to a thousand other things.

That's not strictly true, the actions we take and the environment we are in changes the way our genes are expressed too.

Nurture is the experiences we live, the influence of the people around us and of society.

Now, we are born without nurture by definition, so there all our choices are made by our genetic information. Then, the influence of parents, then family, friends, teachers, makes us who we are. And every choice we make is dependent of what we already experienced. Even when we make a choice, it is dictated by nature or nurture. Even when you break away from what you have been taught, there is a natural or "nurtural" reason for it.

It's dictated by our nature and nurture, nor or Small point, other than that I agree.

So the question is: since we are products of two concepts that we have absolutely no control over, do we make decisions at all or are we just complicated pre-programmed machines, with no free will ?

We do make decisions in the sense that we evaluate the different options in any multi-choice scenario. When we chose between competing options we essentially evaluate them against our desires and we always chose the one that we believe will fulfill the most of our desires, the actual thinking process is our experience of the brain making these evaluations and determining what option best leads this end.