Quote:
Originally Posted by FictionJunction
I find girl A and girl B attractive. I wouldn't go out with girl A because, despite being attractive, she isn't to my liking. Girl B is where it's at.
if you can prove to me that preferences are biological then I'll consider your theory. And pardon my ignorance in this subject, but I just find it to be pretty awkward for it to be true. I always figured preferences came from experiences more than anything.
Either way, I stray from determinism as a defensive impulse because the mere thought of being a part of a bigger chain of events, playing a literally mindless role just bothers me a lot. Whether or not it's true, though, doesn't mater because we wouldn't know the difference now would we.
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It's not that it's entirely a biological preference, but his point was that at some level, biological preference is a variable influencing your decision. Also, preferences come from your biology and experience. You are hardwired with many, many preferences, and this serves as a template for how experience will mold and potentially change some of these preferences. Others will always remain unchanged. This is not really debated at all in the literature.
For example, humans are predisposed to like sweet tastes and dislike bitter ones (if this isn't obvious to you, look again, specifically at the size of society lately D: ). These trait preferences are linked back to specific trait locus on our chromosomes. However, as you can probably tell from experience, the degree of liking for certain sweets is not the same in everyone, and this is highly influenced by experience.
As I see it, the free will debate can be simplified down to something like this:
Let's say I ask you to consciously, out of your own free will, snap your fingers when you're good and ready...whenever you choose to do so. Does the command to snap your fingers proceed before or after the conscious perception of snapping your fingers?
The dichotomy is essentially either (simplistic version):
1) Input information -> motor information runs into the thalamus -> redirection of the information to the frontal lobes and conscious processing of the command -> choice to redirect the information to motor cortex and then back into the spine, which is then followed by a finger snap.
2) Input information -> motor information runs into the thalamus -> redirection of the information to the motor cortex and associated movement areas, command to snap fingers is processed unconsciously -> information is redirected to the frontal lobes and the conscious perception of the command is formed -> information redirected back into the spine, followed by the finger snap.
Now you see, #2 is more along the lines of what actually happens. This is a problem, because it means the perception of choice actually follows the command to perform the action, which seems to imply that choice is only an illusion. You can't infer directly though that we have no choice at all, that at some level we didn't have an influence on the information, but it doesn't appear to be that way.