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Originally posted by venomX As I said, most of them, not all. Some determine the broad outline of things, and may not be changed, but the details can be changed. If it were a purely deterministic system you could not change anything. You can be greatly inclined to being gay by your genes, but how you live your life and how you deal with your inclinations and it's interaction with social life is controlled by you. Obviously you can't control everything in your life, but that doesnt mean you don't have enough flexibility to live your life how you want.

Well if there is a threshold reading for homosexuality then im sure theres a point of no return. The body isnt all 0 and 1 but Im saying why cant it just be we dont have the understanding of biology to realize why its all deterministic? Why isnt this conversation we are having guaranteed by what has happened previously.

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Originally posted by Orbax youre assuming people have the ability to override their genes instruction though. i.e. if we knew what all the genes instructions were it wouldnt be about "persons" it would be figuring out the manual for each human. Then wed have our variables.

please provide an example of a theoretical genetic instruction of the kind you speak of.

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Originally posted by Orbax If you have taken philosophy classes youd realize the answer is "We cant tell so we have to assume reality is real"

erm, i did, that was rhetorical

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Originally posted by Orbax lol why did you tell me that? I never said Atheism = communism

Only because you used two communists as examples for atheists killing people. Ayn Rand was an atheist, but not a communist, and did not advocate genocide. So perhaps the correlation is with communism and not with atheism. That's what I meant to say at least.

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Originally posted by Orbax Well if there is a threshold reading for homosexuality then im sure theres a point of no return. The body isnt all 0 and 1 but Im saying why cant it just be we dont have the understanding of biology to realize why its all deterministic? Why isnt this conversation we are having guaranteed by what has happened previously.

I agree that the broad outlines are determined from what has happened previously. So the question is, our we just focusing on the broad outlines of things, or are we focusing on the broad outlines and details? Obviously what has been said before affects this conversation, but it is affected also by my interpretation your interpretation of my interpretation, my mood, your mood, the medium where the message is relayed, our historical setting, my knowledge, your knowledge, my internal predispositions and yours, my ability to use language and argue effectively and yours. I understand that this could be evaluated as being deterministic when all the information is available. My problem with that evaluation is that even evaluating changes the system. It's so dynamic you can never truly evaluate a specific moment, at the evaluation the system changes. I think we've hit an impasse on this. Maybe if you can clear up your evaluation of what is to be considered deterministic we could make headway

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

Im saying if we could somehow fill in that "what it takes to determine the outcome" gap...wed have determinism. Just because we dont know it now doesnt mean we wont do it later. Itll be like minority report.

Like animals...do you really think a cat has a choice? You pick it up and the Fkr bites and claws you. Its programming.

What makes us different. Complexity adds just that...complexity. It doesnt change the evolutionary nature of our genes that means programming to survive,

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Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov Only because you used two communists as examples for atheists killing people. Ayn Rand was an atheist, but not a communist, and did not advocate genocide. So perhaps the correlation is with communism and not with atheism. That's what I meant to say at least.

I was just saying that the belief that "religion causes killing" could not explain non-religious killing. At most you can say "People sometimes kill each other...for a variety of reasons...none necessarily more driving than the other"

like religious murders within the US are probably quite a bit lower than "GIMME YO WATCH CRACKAAAAAA" killings.

I thought the premise to be ridiculaase

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Originally posted by Orbax Im saying if we could somehow fill in that "what it takes to determine the outcome" gap...wed have determinism. Just because we dont know it now doesnt mean we wont do it later. Itll be like minority report. Like animals...do you really think a cat has a choice? You pick it up and the Fkr bites and claws you. Its programming. What makes us different. Complexity adds just that...complexity. It doesnt change the evolutionary nature of our genes that means programming to survive,

True. In the end it could be deterministic, but for the time being we don't have the information available to make such a statement. There are limitations in language and knowledge to be filled out first. I still sustain that given current evidence I would call it more of a dynamic deterministic system. Sure if you state it as 'if you have all the factors you can calculate an outcome' but is that really relevant to our lives? I forgot the original direction this debate was supposed to go in. For the time being I think that there is some determinism but there is plenty of room for change. I don't think the minimal possible deterministic outcome really has much of an impact on how we conduct ourselves.

Edit: Something I forgot about, error. The system can't be completely deterministic because error in the system can be quantified accurately. Functions in the brain are extremely diffused, therefore even if you could locate the damage to specific parts of the brain and extrapolate the possible amount of damage and then extrapolate the possible change in behavior, you could never fully account for the error that this is going to produce hence you could never fully predict the outcome of a specific set of interactions and it would not be deterministic

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome

Last edited by venomX on Apr-16-2007 at 22:17

Dont worry I believe in Free Will and I think determinism is BS. I just wanted to hit that dead end of everything happens because of social and biological influences that was posited earlier by Psy-T.

I was trying to hit that "there must be an individual level of responsibility" thing because people CAN choose their own thing regardless of influences.

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Originally posted by Orbax There was only 1 true Christian and he died a while ago.

He didn't, NRG2NFINIT only cut his hair!

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Originally posted by Orbax Dont worry I believe in Free Will and I think determinism is BS. I just wanted to hit that dead end of everything happens because of social and biological influences that was posited earlier by Psy-T. I was trying to hit that "there must be an individual level of responsibility" thing because people CAN choose their own thing regardless of influences.

Cool. I hadn't really thought to deeply about it, so thanks for the opportunity hehe.

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Orbax At that point you kind of crossed the rubicon and you might as well lay siege to Rome