A philosophical conundrum

Here's a thought or may be not as you will see.

If every action has a direct cause then it follows that given enough information then every action can be predicted. As thought patterns in the brain are generated by electrical impluses which are subject to the rules of cause and effect then thought itself must be predicatable and therefore predetermined.

So if thought is the result of previous causes or stimuli and can be predicted are we actually "thinking" or just reacting to a set of preordained experiences?

 

Whooo there.

That would presume that the reaction was always to the same action and an action always created the same reaction.

 

Given that the cause is exactly the same in every instance then the reaction should always be the same.

 

Bloke, way to late in the day, try me tomorrow dinner time.

 

Food for thought. It would be nice to know that I am wrong.

 

The way out of that is to introduce variance in the thing the action is being applied to. The exact same set of circumstances would have a different effect on you as it would on me, as a result of our differing genetic makeup and the culumative effect of all our experiences to date.

Thoughts everyone?

 

someone pass the munchies

 

i'll read this again tomorrow whe i'm sober

 

LOL! Oh well, hope everyone's having a good evening and that the headache isn't too bad in the morning

 

just playing some mike oldfield and drinking some merlot...lovely!

 

Sounds good - always good stuff to listen to whilst getting drunk. Which albums are you listeng to, Mr Cat?

 

I was listening top Ommadawn...class cd...haven't heard it i a while either!

 

"If every action has a direct cause then ..."

Its unlikely that there is 'a' direct cause, and given that there may be several (X1, X2, X3 ..) , it is posiible that there interactions as well as direct effects, and also indirect effects:

outcome = aX1 + bX2 + c(X1*X2) , where X2 = f(X3)

if also possible that b= g(X3), that is the effect of X2 is also variable.

then there are other random impacts.

However, its rare that I know what I'm thinking until I've read what I've said ...

{strong coffee please ...}

 

If there is no direct cause then how can there be a reaction or have differing reactions to the same cause,? or to put it another way - if some reactions have a cause and others don't then how can we predict the outcome of any event?

I use "cause" here to mean cause or combination of causes. Either way they are taken as known

 

You're not the first person to have thought about the issue...

You're in good company

Michael.

 

Bollocks

Al Murray

 

Thanks, that makes interesting reading.

 

We can't.

We're quite good at predicting the trend of events though.

We cannot say that this Uranium atom is going to decay, we can say that within a given interval the probability that it will have decayed is x.

Paul