@Izbeckistan 526897 wrote:

Woo woo wooooo.
I think I understand that but Im going cross eyed? I want to understand it more because what I can understand sounds interesting?

ELI5 ?

The electrical signals that your brain produces obey quantum mechanics, which follows a rule called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. This states that you cannot know the momentum and velocity of a particle with exact precision at the same time. The more precisely you determine the value of one, the less you do the other. Therefore your brain signals obey a probabilistic law. I think this allows our decisions to be spread along a series of possibilities. The most likely choice is the one you may have been “conditioned” to take, but you also have a probability of not choosing that path. Like Mezz said, I do believe a lot of what we do is in combination of our environment, our experiences, our genes etc., but that we also have a responsibility over our choices, because our brains behave in this way.

Additionally, while there isn’t really a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, one thing we are able to do which other animals (presumably, at least we haven’t observed this) aren’t is plan for the future. Some animals such as apes can plan for the immediate future (for example, device a strategy using tools to get some food which is out of reach) but none can plan that far ahead (even ants and other animals which store food for winter are just reacting to the plunging temperatures.) There’s no real “tomorrow” in the animal kingdom like there is for us, so there’s that, too.