(September 28, 2013 at 8:38 am)Texas Sailor Wrote: Being able to have done differently than you did?
That's pure illusory. At every instance of choice, people do the exact thing that they're conditioned to do, and they cannot act in a manner that is inconsistent with their nature or beyond their ability to conceive.
I'm not so sure about that. In situations that are out of the ordinary we may default to subconscious reactions that were nothing like what we would expect from ourselves. The most common example would be around someone we are smitten with, a situation that comedies lampoon to no end. But high-stress situations can do the same. I think that whenever we're removed from our comfort zone, we hand a great deal of control over to our subconscious, and that's like handing the house keys to the crazy uncle before we leave on a long vacation. We don't know what will happen, but it's likely to be much worse than we'd have hoped.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
