(January 5, 2013 at 5:15 am)Zen Badger Wrote:(January 5, 2013 at 4:39 am)BGChuckLee Wrote: What's the difference between a rock and an animal?
You can kill an animal with a rock but not a rock with an animal.
Clearly you've never fired an elephant out of a cannon at a cliff face before. It'll make a dent.
![Wink Wink](https://atheistforums.org/images/smilies/wink.gif)
As to the original question, I really am trying to figure out what the point of it might be, and especially how it pertains to the question of free will.
In relation to the OP, I suppose it's a matter of scale: at some level, with enough computational power and data, it might be possible to predict the actions of any given human being based on the chemical impulses in the brain and a detailed knowledge of how those behaviors manifest. We are, after all, defined by our biological makeup, by which I mean our parameters are set up by our genetics, not some nebulous soul. However, there's nothing on earth with the predictive capabilities to do this, and maybe there won't be; so long as we have some degree of uncertainty, we retain our free will.
Perhaps in the future a machine will be invented that can pull back the curtain and reveal to us exactly how we are influenced by our body chemistry to act; would we still have our free will then? I'd say yes, assuming we could ignore what the machine predicts. In the end, it doesn't matter if we are dominated by our biology or not; from our scale of consciousness there is no distinction.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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