There seems to be almost no truly free will. You are far more genetically preprogrammed than you would credit. Go back and reread the earlier thread about the GodModule (an excerpt is included below). For example, there is no way for a human being operating without aids to generate an "unpredictable series of numbers". Current thinking is that much less than 30% of what you are is determined by environment. Bear in mind that what you absorb from the environment is preconditioned by the pathways of your mind.
And IMO the entire spewing that people are more than the sum of their parts is completely unfounded and no better than wishful thinking. If people want to assert things like that in a "logical and rational" environment, they need to found there statements. I watch with interest. That said, I think that we are far better defined by the people we remember and the way people remember us than we are by the elements that define our physical presence. Confusing isn't it?
TheHermit
Excerpt from "re virus: God Module" 1999/03/31
E.O. Wilson teaches zoology at
Harvard and created and named the field of sociobiology. He has
compressed
its underlying premise into a single paragraph. "Every human brain," he
says, "is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be
filled in
by experience but as 'an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into
developer fluid.' You can develop the negative well or you can develop
it
poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not
already imprinted on the film. The print is the individual's genetic
history, over thousands of years of evolution, and there is not much
anybody
can do about it." Furthermore, says Wilson, genetics determine not only
things such as temperament, role preferences, emotional responses, and
levels of aggression, but also many of our most revered "moral" choices,
which are not choices at all in any free-will sense but tendencies
in the hypothalamus and limbic regions of the brain, a concept expanded
upon
in 1993 in a much-talked-about book, The Moral Sense, by James Q. Wilson
(no
kin to Edward O.).