Least and most religious nations

[denuseri]

What I mean by hardwired...is exactly what any doctor who passed boards any nurse who remebers her prereq courses, and any scientist worth his or her salt: can tell you...its the most basic axion of not only anatomy and phisiology but all the physical sciences as well. From subatomic particles to the largest of blackholes.

Structure = function.

This applies from the smallest of mesurable objects to the largest.

Rearange somethings atomic structure and you have changed it's function.

Its how we design drugs and engineer space stations or computers etc etc.

Without knowing that axion, one is only blindly plodding along like a blind person in a roller derby.

When the human brain...or that of any of the animals with a brain..does something, anything, or is even at rest and just thinking or dreaming, massive ammounts of chemical chains called hormones are being released by different glands in the body in direct responce to the transfer of even more electrical chemical impulses that are a a result of various transfers of physical structures within one's celluar metabolism...such as the sodium/potasium gated channels that pass one electron loaded particle on from one nerve cell to the next until the charge is distributed thus popogating a command from the higher regions of one's brain to oh say..scratch that thing thats making your nose itch. All these little messengers have physical stuctures...as do the cells they travel through...every square in of one's body is made up of some kind of physical structure working in accordance with its counterparts becuase of it.

That includes the brain itself.

Much of what we think is completely free will is a reaction to electro-chemicals in your body structurally interacting with other structures in your brain as well, even "memories" have such coresponding structural patterns.

Its the structural hardware of the brain that determines the functions of the brain.

Not everyone can become a grand master in chess can they?

Nor can just anyone become an olympic athelete can they?

The reason isnt always becuase all the people who try and fail just up and decided to quit, it is allmost allways becuase those people have something inside them that the others didn't that let them press on despite whatever dificulties.

Science just happen to be proving that nature plays a larger role than the nurture crowd would like it too is all and its disturbing for some.

I am not saying the software (one's personal experiences or deductive reasoning or "free will" has nothing to do with it...I am only saying that it is becuase of it (it being the hardware or the structural arrangments and interactions between them) that we even have the illusion of it.

[Thorne]

Structure = function.

I don't know if I'd go that far. Certainly, structure IMPLIES function, but does not necessarily mean it's limited to that function. The human foot is obviously designed to walk, but can also be used to kick a football. We can learn to use different things for different purposes. And some parts of our body, such as the appendix, have outlived their original purpose, but can still function in a different manner. This applies to the brain as well. How else to explain stroke victims reprogramming themselves to utilize undamaged parts of their brains in order to at least partially regain abilities which were lost in the damaged portions.

This applies from the smallest of mesurable objects to the largest.

Then how do you explain the carbon atom? It can be arranged into the hardest known material, diamond, yet is integral to organic molecules, which are generally far from hard. Even graphite, which is as pure a form of carbon as diamond, has a far different function.

Much of what we think is completely free will is a reaction to electro-chemicals in your body structurally interacting with other structures in your brain as well, even "memories" have such coresponding structural patterns.

And yet, different people, with arguably the same, or very similar, structures, will respond in markedly different ways.

Its the structural hardware of the brain that determines the functions of the brain.

Again, this is a generalization, since parts of the brain can be retrained to perform functions for which they were not meant to perform.

Not everyone can become a grand master in chess can they?

Again, this argues against structure being a strict controller of function. If that were true then we COULD all become grand masters.

Science just happen to be proving that nature plays a larger role than the nurture crowd would like it too is all and its disturbing for some.

This is true. We are learning more and more about WHY we do things, and a lot of it is because we are predisposed to do them due to our genetic makeup. But predisposed does not necessarily mean required. Part of being human is the ability to recognize these traits and, hopefully, gain some kind of control over them. This is what makes one person risk his life to save someone while another person runs away.