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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Well, yes. We are a collection of inputs and outputs. We cease to be in a vacuum. I can't find the study, but I'm almost certain I remember reading about an experiment where scientists removed a rat brain and studied what happened when they gave it everything it needed except external stimuli. They found the brain atrophied and eventually just stopped. That doesn't mean the same would happen to humans, but it suggests that external stimuli are necessary for consciousness.
Our lives appear to be a chain of cause and effect impacted by our surroundings. Any prediction or anticipation we do is in response to external stimuli priming us to expect some form of action or inaction to occur.
To try and put it another way, your response was predetermined, as is mine. The text on the screen released photons in a pattern my brain could recognize, which were then focused by my cornea and projected onto my retina. Those photons were translated into a mix of chemical and electrical impulses that traveled up my optic nerves and into my brain. From there, they were filtered through a highly complex series of algorithms that used things like prior experience and personality to decide whether or not I should respond, and if so, how I should do it. At no point in this did I actually get to choose, everything was cause and effect with my choice being an illusion.
This isn't some grand conspiracy theory about lizard men hijacking your brainwaves; it's just simple cause and effect. You responded the way you did because deep inside your brain, you decided that what you wrote was the best way to respond based on prior experience, and so you did. The same is true for me.
Two things: 1. Considering we can't even predict which slit a photon will go through in a double-slit experiment or a stochastic system like the precession of a top spinning, it's difficult to say that our actions, each of which the results of many millions of synapsis firing in concert, are predetermined.
Even if we were able to create a complete replica of our brains to the synapse level, that model would not be able to predict our future responses 100% because synapses are always changing. So who you are 2 minutes from now is not the same as who you are now.
All this to say that the belief that we have no control over the cause and effect in our lives is facetious at best and cowardly at worst.