1) Is there free will?
2) What if women were as physically strong as men?
3) What is the difference between life & death?
spoiler warning : "Prussian Blue" aka "Midnight Blue"
Is there free will? Or are we just genetically programmed to react in a predisposed manner, to believe we are free to choose when we aren’t. We don’t think of babies having free will when they are born, their bodies just do stuff, they follow their body’s urges, they might even react to the environment, but does an infant make the conscience decision, “right now I will cry”? When someone is chemically imbalanced, do they have free will? Or are they mentally incapacitated, to use the legal term?
We are made up of biology, which is made up of chemistry. Chemicals do not make decisions. They follow chemical reactions.
In “Can the Mind Just be a Machine” Hille states that humans used to think that our planet was special, at the center of the universe. Then Darwin showed we were biologically no different from animals. Perhaps now we will find out that we are not any different than a chemical machine.
Crazy thought, what if God does play dice with the universe, and in doing so, that is where free will comes in? Quantum mechanics is crazy, and I have no clue what it’s about, but I have heard that in QM there is a certain amount of uncertainty.
(Side note: If we are simply complex chemical reactions, then art can be reduced to a formula. And we can judge the quality of art by the formula.)
And just because we aren’t smart enough to think of the answer, doesn’t mean the answer doesn’t exist. Try explaining irrational numbers to a snail.
What if, on average, women were as physically strong as men? How would society be different? How would human history be different? Would women then be just as violent as men? Would the equal rights be a given?
Speaking of chemical reactions, what is so special about the death process that it can not be reversed? Awhile ago, chemists proved there is nothing inherently special about organic compounds when the made one (ureic acid, I think) in the lab. They did the famous building of proteins experiment. Why haven’t we been able to take some chemicals off the shelf, mix them together, and create life?
Posted by joncim at March 16, 2005 09:08 PM