[Fyron]

Originally posted by Jack Simth:
Fyron:
Interesting though - if you hold to a no free will universe, you contradict an earlier post where you said true prophecy was impossible. Without free will, prophecy simply becomes a matter of calculating inevitability, a feat of information processing, information awareness, and knoweledge of the rules of the universe, but not an impossibility.

The problem is, you have to be outside of the universe to be able to calculate inevitability. You can not see every factor that goes into derermining what happens in the long run while you remain inside the universe. As there is no outside of the universe, you can't do that, and so prophecy remains impossible.

Why sure we do - even if you postulate that everything there is to a person is based solely on the various chemical and physical properties of that person's constituent elements, there is still the problem of Quantum Mechanics.

I did not postulate that.

Besides, I have to remind myself to eat. I can very easily get caught up in something and forget....

Yes, but you did not choose whether to eat or not. What determined whether you ate or not was what had happened to you in the past few hours/days. You do not just randomly decide to eat a meal. What makes you eat is not having eaten for a long enough period to become hungry. What you eat is determined by what you have eaten in the past, and what you have learned about foods. The food you have been exposed to as a child helps to determine your tastes. You do not make a perfectly free-willed decision devoid of any other factors on whether to eat a pizza or a hamburger.

You have the illusion of free will because you do not realize all of the factors involved in your decisions.

[ March 20, 2003, 00:38: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]