Spearthrower wrote:... My hunger might be definable as a cause outside my volition, and it might drive me to seek food, but the actions I take to do so - such as walking downstairs, going to the fridge, collecting the items together, and then cooking into a final meal are not mechanistic or predetermined. The ghrelin made me hungry, but it didn't make me perform all those actions.

The deterministic argument here of course is that your journey to the fridge is determined by the construction of your abode and your previous choices in appliances, and the meal is determined by the food you've purchased, the availability, transport, production of that food, the environmental and economic setting it was grown in, etc etc etc. A causal chain of specific material conditions predetermined your breakfast, which also include your state of being hungry.

But we're just rehashing the Free Will debate, rather than talking about any particular consequences for morality and/or ethics.

THWOTH wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:... My hunger might be definable as a cause outside my volition, and it might drive me to seek food, but the actions I take to do so - such as walking downstairs, going to the fridge, collecting the items together, and then cooking into a final meal are not mechanistic or predetermined. The ghrelin made me hungry, but it didn't make me perform all those actions.

The deterministic argument here of course is that your journey to the fridge is determined by the construction of your abode and your previous choices in appliances, and the meal is determined by the food you've purchased, the availability, transport, production of that food, the environmental and economic setting it was grown in, etc etc etc. A causal chain of specific material conditions predetermined your breakfast, which also include your state of being hungry.

That's what I am saying is clearly absurd because these multifarious variables can in no way represent a predetermined state with predictable consequences of any degree of certainty. There's no determination in advance of all the multitudes of variables towards a specific outcome. Hunger induces me to seek out food, but hunger doesn't induce me to live in a house like this, or dictate which appliances I bought etc., the rest are not conditional on that hunger at all, rather, the way I go about resolving my hunger is constrained but still free to choose - I could go out and buy something ready made instead, or just have toast despite there being more sophisticated meals available to be made from the fridge's contents, or think 'fuck walking down all those stairs - I'll just go hungry'. Constraints aren't determinism constraints do not produce an inevitable.

THWOTH wrote:But we're just rehashing the Free Will debate, rather than talking about any particular consequences for morality and/or ethics.

We are, but it seems like we have to whenever the concept of free will is raised.