you're evil. you know that, right?

I like you exercising thought experiments, but hot damn, sometimes you just troll like you live under a bridge.

He even battled you eloquently and carefully. You still took him for a keel-haul, just for fun.

There is nothing eloquent about directly contradictory statements.

You were looking for a fight, and found one in a colloquialism. You know exactly what you did.

Yes I know exactly what I did, and that was point out the absurdity of observing a conscious animal and thereby declaring it nothing but clockwork. It is an ongoing debate that makes the rounds. What are you doing here? Looking for a fight? No.

Way to no-sell a rhetorical device. I happen to think the clockwork analogy is pretty good. There's very little evidence that anything non-deterministic is going on in our brains. At least, nothing less deterministic than the rest of the universe. But on the flip side, things like the "game of life" show that even very simple deterministic mechanisms can build arbitrarily complicated machines. So saying we're all just clockwork is not by any means wrong. It's just becoming increasingly apparent that every step up in complexity of a machine yields substantially different results. So it's reasonable to think we're just really complicated clockwork, whether that makes us special or not is really an immaterial value judgment.