2004-03-02 - 8:03 a.m.
So I have been reading the screwtape letters by cs lewis. It is about a corespondence between a tempter demon and his uncle screwtape who is a former tempter. Quite an amusing book and look into human morals and actions but then I realzied a lot of christians really think there are demons tempting them to do wrong and angels trying to battle to make them do right. The fact that it still comes down to their perception of freewill anyway makes me wonder why you would put two completely opposing spirits to cancel each other out.
Seems like it would be easier to just let their notion of freewill take over compeltely. As for freewill I am still amazed with all the advancements we have made that people still think there is this entity of a soul residing somewhere in them that really controls their actions. The more and more we learn about the brain and neurosystems the more we start to see that we simply are just a complex chaotic system of wiring that responds to another set of chaotic systems and gives a repsonse based on our design at the momment. What this means is that eventualy we may be able to make a computer system respond in exactly the same way we would even if we try and trick it. I do not see how we oculd think outside ourseves. It seems as if we are a deterministic entity but since the complexity level is so high we seem to think we are doing completely random nonrepeatable actions. It is similar to predictiing the weather, another good chaotic system, right now there are just too many variables in making extreemly acurate predictions but as time goes on we becoem better and better at it.
Maybe at some very small level quatum mechanical radomness influences our desitions in such a way as to make them nonrepeatable but that has never been shown. This could mean that what has been shown in the movies is slightly true. You could predict future violent action based on the nueronal makeup of the person. You could not predict what or when really because of all the other systems that would be interacting in making a future prediction of long term action but you could see likelyhoods and work to correct them with alternative stimulus. Sitting here it is hard to imagine that I am just a complex machine responding to the stimulus around me but that seems to be the best answer when you take our need to be in control out of it and just let the facts remain.
