Abdallah: Humans are living natural beings. On the one hand, they are endowed with intrinsic natural powers to influence the objects around them. On the other, like other animals and plants, they are cursed with physical needs vital to their existence. The distinct activity underlying human development is the conscious deployment of the one to reduce the suffering caused by the other. As these activities accumulate over time, we call the result "technology."

Your questions are functionally equivalent. Basically, you are asking if humans are determined by the environment, by the entropy, by the chaos. My answer is "no." Humans are not determined. They are conditioned. The first human builds a house out of the trees in the forest. Her daughter inherits the house and adds a fence to hold the wild animals she captures during her lifetime. Agency is fundamental to these activities, but agency is intimately tied with the surrounding objects, and the surrounding objects are in turn intimately tied with historical process.

-- ShayBanerjee - 29 Mar 2015