[dogscoff]

I have to admit that I'm highly dubious of the extreme determinist position. Here are my two cents (or eurocents):

I agree with you, but I'm playing devil's advocate here, so...

So, the way I see it, natural law dictates a certain range of behaviors on the macro level, but free will has everything to do with decisions on a micro level.

But the macro level is just a manifestation of events on the micro level. In fact, there *is* no macro level- that's just an abstraction made up by our puny mortal minds that, for some obscure reason, find it easier to process the concept of "a lump of wood" than "a hundred squillion carbon, hydrogen and assorted other atoms in a particulr arrangement."

I'll grant that natural law (genetics, physics, etc.) does have some effect on basic human function, personality and so on. What I look like, how my body has developed, and my basic temperment does seem to have been imposed by natural law. After seeing the development of my daughter and her friends, I would agree that natural law does play a significant role (I used to be more of an extremist on the nurture side in the "nature versus nurture" debate).

It's not nature vs nurture- nature and nurture are *both* within the realm of cause and effect. I'll explain after another quote or two...

But, I don't see how natural law makes me stay up too late working on the frigate design for my ship set, or dictates which type of cereal I eat in the morning.

Let me put it this way: Your every decision and your every involuntary process is a result of who You are. (Note the capital letter) If you stay up all night on your shipset, it's because there are factors at work in You stronger than your urge to sleep. There's no mystery to it- A desire for completion, a desire to impress your peers, the fact that you had a nap just after lunch and aren't too tired... Dozens of conflicting factors that all combine to make Your behaviour. The question is, who are You?

The trouble is, you can't let go of this idea that You are any less a pile of atoms than your breakfast cereal or your desk. Your brain and body constitute a hugely complex pattern of matter, but it is still just a finite lump of matter.

The pattern your matter-lump now happens to occupy is You. Your entire state of mind and personality, your memories and emotions, all of it down to every Last tiny detail is encoded in the exact, unique arrangement of nerves and cells and tissues and chemicals that make up your brain and body at this exact moment. In a micro second it will be changed- gone forever, replaced by a slightly different You.

The important thing is that all those factors I mentioned earlier, the ones that decide whether or not you go to bed, those things are encoded in your current pattern as well. Your creative urge is a particularly complex budles of nerves somewhere in your head. Your tiredness is a build up of chemicals in your nervous system. Which one is stronger? Your decision to stay up or go to bed is determined by the interaction of this physical matter in You- your "pattern", as I keep calling it.

has everything to do with decisions on a micro level.

But the micro-level physical matter that is You is still subject to physical laws. If you were to look at any particle in your body at any given moment in time (for example the crucial atom in your brain that can tip the balance between you going to bed or not), if you looked at it you would see that it does not have a choice about what happens to it next. Physics (ignoring quantum stuff) only allows one possible course of action. There is only one thing it can do, so you WILL go to bed or you WILL stay up.

And all of this holds for every single one of your atoms and protons and neutrons and whatever-elsons, and all the other particles in the universe, all the time, and it has done since the Big Bang, and shall be ever thus until the entire universe crumples into itself in a great big entropic heap.

Extrapolate this process backwards through your life, with the state of your physical being at any given moment being the inevitable result of the state it was in an instant before, and you see that you have no free will. You just think you do, atom-bag.

[ March 21, 2003, 16:25: Message edited by: dogscoff ]