A quick search and I couldn’t find any threads covering this topic, so here it goes.
How much does society affect our lives?
This covers a variety of topics.
First, how much of the difference between the genders is learned, and how much genetic?
Second, how much of our biases are inborn, and how much are seen in the media? This includes biases against fat people, short people, etc.
Third, how much does society contribute to the violence in the world around us? I don’t have any statistics handy, but violence in the workplace and schools seemed to have increased recently. Could this be a result of video games and more violent television shows, or is it just people are getting meaner?
A baby is born with certain pre-dispositions within its genetic inheritance or from intra-uterine experiences. At this time it is a minimally reasoning subject.
Experiences begin to flood in, both ordered and disordered. These experiences will be interpreted and acted upon with self-consciousness gradually evolving.
These experiences will continue throughout life.
There is incredible complexity in the phenomena and the subjects reaction to them.
The question is, ‘How do we determine what is genetic, what is learned, and what is chosen?’
Some people have a poor genetic inheritance (as best as can be determined) and yet go on to achieve incredible amounts. And vice versa. Some people have excellent genetic predisposition and yet make no apparent use of it.
Some people have poor social experiences and become social misfits. And vice versa. Some people have excellent social experiences and yet do not become great achievers.
There is virtually no method by which we can predict individual outcome from a summary of genetic and social experience for an individual; much seems random.
Generalisations can be made about large groups of people, but specific predictions do not seem to work.
How do we deal with this?
We create something called free-will, and use the blameworthyness that this allows us to impute to do all the explaining. Non-scientfic, but extremely useful!