u/jepensedonc1

Just found this page! Yay!

This just came up in my feed and I am unsure how I had never encountered this page before/why I had never searched it. I am a hard incompatibilist and believe in determinism. I work in molecular neuroscience (highest level of education achieved just the bachelor's so far though) and also have another degree in philosophy. After a lot of reading, I fully believe that I am a sum of parts, a ship of theseus, an automaton of genes which become proteins that send signals via neurons that form networks that compute your response to everything. Neurons which also fire more frequently following hebbian learning and the molecular process of long term potentiation (LTP). Which pathways are recruited via repetition is all a matter of environment and circumstance and what you happen to be exposed to in life. But it's just that: the molecular biology of your brain (not just genes, either, but things like viral exposure, medications, injury, diet... anything that can alter your biochemistry) + what you experience in life. If you were somehow to be cloned and given the exact same life experiences (which is not possible but hypothetically) I do believe that you would make the exact same decisions and do everything the same way and this is beyond your control.

We are just organisms. We are no more special than an amoeba, just more complex and developed as a system.

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u/jepensedonc1 — 12 hours ago

Hypothetical situation: had France and Belgium colonized most of Central and South America and Spain and Portugal colonized most of Africa rather than the other way around, how would these continents be different now?

Politically, culturally, economically, socially, linguistically, etc, what are some things you think would/wouldn't have happened (or things that would/wouldn't be created) based on historical and contemporary evidence?

(This is not for any particular purpose BTW. This was a shower thought and now I'm genuinely curious.)

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u/jepensedonc1 — 1 day ago