Predictive Brainology

Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader (or perhaps a clockwork collection of inanimate brain atoms) writes in to ask:

“Can one, by knowledge of mechanical causes, say beforehand which way Shakespeare’s pen will go, as it traces words on paper?”

Are we assuming that thoughts are atoms and that the conclusions and deductions and imaginations and speculations of a thought as it thinks are the same as the motions of an atom as it is moved by the impulse of external forces?

With this...