Following from my reading of Hume for an essay I did earlier in the year I have been strengthening my beliefs in determinism. The idea that an original stimulus produces a set outcome in an organism seems to make a lot of sense to me although I would concede that its not always that simple. However I believe that these stimulus responses evolve with the aid of memory so that the first bite of chocolate would give an initial response that it is tasty. Next time the memory of the tastiness of chocolate would prompt someone to try it again. This could continue until someone sees a gain in their weight and another set of stimuli suggest a connection between eating chocolate and gaining weight (perhaps a magazine article) and then yet another memory informs you that gaining weight reduces your survival chances. These memories are all in themselves stimuli, so that the more a stimulus is experienced, the more it is informed by historic stimuli until it becomes an extremely complicated mixture of all the stimuli involved in every experience of the chocolate all at once, which is processed and simplified into an action (eat it or dont eat it). In this way it seems to follow with Humes idea that every thought is a result of stimuli recieved from the world. So that there will be billions of differences between the brains of even identical twins. This would make it hard to influence every single human as they have all led very different lives in which different collections of stimuli have led them to have different beliefs about any one thing (as well as their current conditions when they next come across something; I could be hungry next time I see chocolate). However perhaps a repetition of a new set of symbols or objects could help to strengthen a new set of beliefs, in effect brainwashing through repeated art forms.
