| Jay520 said: That's what I'm saying. If a person's personality is completely dependent upon those factors, then what makes any person different from another? When we make decisions, are we 'making' decisions, or are our brains just performing outputs based upon external stimuli that any other human would make when met with the same circumstances? Did you choose to post a comment or is your brain simply apart of a strict function with no possible way of performing a different output? Well, of course you chose to post the comment because your want to post overcame your need to use the restroom. But do you ultimately control your want to post or need to go to the restroom? I don't know where I'm going with this, I just thought it was an interesting topic & was interested in others' opinions |
Different experiences ofcourse. Nobody can have exactly the same experiences.
Causality suggests that free will can't exist, the atoms in your brain adhere to the laws of physics. If human conciousness is nothing more then a program running on the vast neural networks of your brain then it is very much pre determined what your reaction will be. That doesn't mean that you can exactly predict what someone will do, it will be a while before we can simulate a brain inside a computer.
But maybe conciousness is more then that, or maybe the brain has a way to influence physics. Fringe sience like the global conciousness project suggests so. They claim human conciousness can affect quantum based random number generators by constantly observing the output of a network of random number generators all over the world and correlating their behaviour to big events that are supposed to align peoples thoughts. The evidence is pretty minor though and a lot of events don't seem very big and randomly chosen. It gets even weirder when they say they saw a spike right before 911 happened, claiming that people could feel the terrible event before it actually happened.
Maybe one day computers and brain scanners are powerful enough to download the current state of your brain into a computer. Then you can test what happens with multiple copies with the exact same inputs. Whether that's ethical is another matter. And that probably still won't give a 100% conclusive result since our brains are analog devices. For example tiny fluctuations in the magnetic field or background radiation can tip the balance in analog neural networks.
An interesting topic, are you making decisions, or merely witnessing them. There must be some benefit to conciousness otherwise evolution wouldn't have bothered with it?
