Free Will (The two Pre's)

It's another post about a distinction only I bother to think about! And this one can be applied to everything from contemporary LGBT issues to the fundamental nature of life and experiential reality! Wow much Berkeley.

There's a lot of debate about the whole issue of nature vs. nurture, and how much of a person's identity and all is determined as a manifestation of their genes, how much of it is determined from the setting in which they grow up, and how much of it is delivered to them by a spider that wears a Noh mask and lives at the end of a rainbow. I think the debate is interesting, certainly, but ultimately doesn't matter. I believe everybody has potential inherent to them as a result of their status as a manifestation of the universe's creative drive.

To balance how abstract and feely that sentence was, here is the quadratic formula.


What I will definitely say is that such a thing as a "predisposition" does exist. People are predisposed to all types of things. Addictive-compulsive behavior, diseases pathogenic and genetic, whatever. And again there's the issue of what a "family history" really means; drawing a line between something encoded into your genes over time and behavior resulting from interpersonal interaction is difficult at best. Either way, however, the fact remains that people acquire a unique set of traits, strengths, and weaknesses very early in life. You could think of it as a great arc, with each person having different parts brought into focus and others blurred out. Each person has a unique set of things emphasized and downplayed, and to different extents, and so on. It's why you can get into that situation where someone shares all your interests but you just don't like him or her.

What this doesn't mean, importantly, is that you are a big set of manifested predispositions. This is one reason the nature vs. nurture debate as a whole actually bugs me; "nature" and "nurture" are two things responsible for creating you as a person, but that implies that you had nothing to do with it. The idea of it being simply "nature vs. nurture" seems to undermine the idea of agency as I see it. Nature is your genes, and nurture is how you're brought up, but in my estimation the most important part of determining who you are is you. Conscious choices about yourself are the essence of self-improvement, and it makes me uneasy to hear the idea of self-definition broken down to just inherited vs. instilled like that.

Predestination, in short, isn't real. You are you, the result of almost fifteen billion years of collapsing hydrogen and exploding stars, manufactured by the creative current of the entire cosmos. You are whatever you want to be, not a warped echo of your family members' issues nor a bundle of genes piloting a meat construct designed to replicate themselves. The physical vessel of your consciousness, the things that have happened to it, and even the things you feel are what you're doing; they are not what you are.

TL;DR You're a conscious human with the power of choice, not a mixing beaker of DNA and childhood trauma.