>>15551970What if I said you're right? Regardless of whether I said you were right or were wrong, how things work would not change at all. Either I could be wrong and you could be right, or you could be wrong and I would be right, or both of us could be wrong. Could I change my mind? Well, I would have to find something sufficiently convicing for it, but it might not necessarily come towards me anywhere during my lifetime. Would it hinder me or encourage me to do anything differently? Perhaps not.
Is there any reason to claim that environmental or genetic determinism is any more midwittish than believing that people are shaped by trauma and other strongly felt experiences? It doesn't seem like there should have to be, for both of them sound equally plausible if regarded on their own merits. The only thing that does not seem very convincing is believing that humans have unrestrained free will and are not subject to any pressures except those that they let themselves be subjected to. Although expressions of pain and pleasure may be greatly accentuated at will, being completely unaffected by them at one's own will seems like something impossible to believe for me, for no other reason than my experience with them. A person may feel a prick or falling from some stairs without shouting in response to them, but, if they are not completely numb, lacking any reception of sensations from body parts affected by them, they would feel "something".
Now, going on from this, regarding whether or not habits and behavior are fixed at a certain point or if they can come to change, one may not claim anything as evidence for either one or the other, for one could say that many behavioral changes brought about by a shift in circumstances are merely a different way of responding to an environment that one had always "had" inside, but that one had not had the need to make use of for as long as one was in a different environment. Could it be a shift in personality? Only an apparent one.
