"there are other factors at work. Factors that shape character, personality, wants and needs, including genetics, and consequently, decisions that are made by the individual.
Yet say decision making is not dictated by our environment. You lost me. Influenced I'd agree with.
"Our thoughts though abstract and vaporous in form, are determined by the actions of specific neuronal circuits in our brains. "
There is evidence to the contrary. And as best as I can determine it's all very fuzzy, both sides.
It's an interaction of environment and genetics. Our environment provides the information that the brain processes. Your mental abilities, strengths and weakness being determined by neural architecture.
''When it comes to the human brain, even the simplest of acts can be counter-intuitive and deceptively complicated. For example, try stretching your arm.
Nerves in the limb send messages back to your brain, but the subjective experience you have of stretching isn't due to these signals. The feeling that you willed your arm into motion, and the realisation that you moved it at all, are both the result of an area at the back of your brain called the posterior parietal cortex. This region helped to produce the intention to move, and predicted what the movement would feel like, all before you twitched a single muscle.
Michel Desmurget and a team of French neuroscientists arrived at this conclusion by stimulating the brains of seven people with electrodes, while they underwent brain surgery under local anaesthetic. When Desmurget stimulated the parietal cortex, the patients felt a strong desire to move their arms, hands, feet or lips, although they never actually did. Stronger currents cast a powerful illusion, convincing the patients that they had actually moved, even though recordings of electrical activity in their muscles said otherwise.''
