[Ghoulish Delight]

[eta: in response to iSm's post about "affected by" vs. "determined by"]

What is it determined by? And more to the point, what necessitates that there be something else that it must be determined by? What about the physical universe is insufficient for producing thought, when we can demonstrate such a direct link between brain chemistry and thought?

I say determined by and I mean determined by. The thought that you have that affects the thought the thought that you're about to have was affected by the thought previous to that, which was affected by the thought of your neighbor which led them to put a red curtain in the window viewable from your front door instead of blue, which was affected by the thought his cat had before knocking the crate and barrel catalog off the table so that it landed open to the page showing a room with red curtains, which was affected by the gust of wind 10 seconds earlier, etc. etc. etc. until everything is affected by every single atom, every single proton, every single quark, every single bit of everything that has ever existed and ever will exist. Yes, determined by. On such a unfathomable vast scale that we have no choice but to abstract that determination down to where it LOOKS like "affected by" rather than "determined by", but make no mistake, at some point it all comes back to the same thing - recreate the absolute identical state of the universe at any point down to the finest sub-atomic Heisenbergian detail and hit play, and you will get the same result.