Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180327004110/@comment-31763506-20180409040555

Responding to Leto's post, an ant can't make moral choices... Is a choice that you are predetermined to make really a choice?

Yes.

You're getting it wrong exactly the way I was trying to describe. You can't contemplate the full complexity of your own mind (that would require a brain bigger than the one you have), so you're simplifying the processes that deterministically take in millions of stimuli and coordinate a body of trillions of cells to respond in a meaningful way and instead building a simplistic model where one thing causes something else.

An ant is pretty well suited to live the limited life of an ant. It's brain "decides" things in only a very limited sort of way. It's incapable of learning. If you give an ant saccharine to eat, it will never figure out that you are giving it garbage with no nutritional value instead of food. The population of a bunch of ant colonies that a dedicated biologist maintained and constantly gave exactly as many calories of sugar per day to maintain their biomass as well as a few piles of saccharine might "learn" to reject the saccharine on a human timescale through natural selection favoring the colonies where the queen produced workers who could taste or smell the difference and reject the saccharine, but no individual ant will ever learn the difference.

Any choice you make is immensely meaningful because it's the result of everything in your environment plus everything you have ever learned. It's completely and totally unique in the history of the universe. No one else will act in exactly the same way again.

You're also overloading "predetermined" with the connotation "by someone".