I believe in wholly in determinism (thanks for reminding me of the term Complish) while I have ideas and thoughts and feelings and such, I don't think that they are anything more than very complicated feedback loops in my brain. I believe that my choices represent preferances I had at the time of making my decesion, but that I would always make the same decision in exactly the same situation.

To me everything can be boiled down to a state machine, which is an abstract idea of a system that has some amount of states and a table of all the possible transitions from a given state for any combination of inputs. Thinking things, meaning things with brains, satisfy the conditions needed to be classified as state machines, we take in input constantly and are always shifting from state to state. My favorite example of this is good old PMS. Give the same inputs to a girl who's hormones are raging and to an identical girl who is more chemically balanced and you'll probobly get very different results. Obviously this doesn't prove anything, it just allows the possibility. The girls who are reacting to the stimulii we gave them go through a process where they think that they evaluate they're inputs and take some action. In reality (I believe) the process that creates the illusion of will is just a part of the state change.

I often wonder why the thought process itself is needed however, which causes me to doubt myself. My beliefs are so prone to doubt that I generally don't think about them, I merely act on what is happening around me. Fortunately for my sanity, no belief system can truly be proven, since everything fails the Cartesian test for reality. The only thing I can prove is that I exist. DesCartes took the easy (and non-burn-at-the-stakeable way out, using God to get him out of the void).

Nowadays we say, look at what I did, I choose to do that because I have free will, whether you do or not is indeterminable and thus it's a waste of time worrying about it. However, something being meaningless in an absolute sense is no reason not to give it personal meaning and thus philosophy exists.

@complich: Your probabalistic indeterminism seems to look identical to my determinism if viewed from the same point of referance. I look at the world from outside of it, and outside of time, and thus I see what happened, what was done and I conclude that what happened happend the only way it could happen until time stopped, and then there was nothing. You seem to look forward from a specific point in time, within the universe, carrying the past with you (socialization) and attach a probability to what you are most likely to do, given who you are as a person. The only difference is that you don't seem to believe that a full and complete definition of you exists (it is you) and that there is only one event with a non-zero probability that you can do at a given time, and it is that you will do what you would do in the situation you were in, and in the future, you will be doing whatever the combination of how you are at the time and the inputs you are recieving tell you to do.

This is my long sleep deprived theory. Next time we shall see how different inputs cause radical behavior in state machine people.