[QuarianRex]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
The qualities of that force set the entire universe in motion in a direction determined by the qualities (power, direction etc) of the force. Every movement of every atom from that moment until now, including the atoms in your brain clustered together right now in the right pattern to form the decision "I will eat" or "I will not eat"... every single movement in the entire universe is predetermined in just the same way the the balls on the pool table were. you have no free will. Your decisions are just cause-and-effect results of physical phenomena within your brain, which in turn are only the way they are because they were put there by other cause and effect reactions, and so on right to the big bang.

Interesting statement. The problem is that it doesn't take onto account gestalt, or emergent, properties. When a system (whether it be composed of atoms, neurons, people, cultures, etc.) gets to a certain level of complexity it can display qualitatively different features, ones that cannot be predicted solely through knowledge of the constituent elements. Examples of such would be the emergence of life from matter, the emergence of consciousness, the emergence of the nation-state, the properties of many drugs, breaching the speed of light, etc. Using the billiard analogy, this would be equivalant to a particularly complex shot causing all the balls to merge into a 30 foot tall MechaGodzilla that promptly dashed off to play in the land of Nod. The laws of physics could not predict that.

Determinism falls apart in the face of such drastic shifts in expectation.