You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.
Edit: this was in response to a prior edit of the parent that (correctly) explicitly stated their position was a personal belief, not some sort of universally acknowledged axiom as they have since edited it to seem.
If you don't believe in conscious choice the whole debate is moot anyway.
The claim is that folks are nothing more than "a derivation of their previous person states", and that correspondingly there is little to nothing a person can choose to do to escape the path set for them by their start state. I personally think this is blatantly false, and I have many observations to support my position.
FFS that's an unbelievably bad interpretation. Are you just trolling or you really can't see the difference between that interpretation and "what we become depends in great part on where we're starting from"??
If you don't disagree with my criticism of the comment I replied to, you've certainly picked an odd way to express that.
No it isn't "opportunity", there has never been as much opportunity in the world to move up the social hierarchy as it exists now.
It's a weird thing to be pointing out, like... duh, but the context was a bunch of:
> You have to balk when anyone says....
and
> You have to disbelieve anyone who says...
And I was hoping to establish that we in this thread do in fact agree that causation works in one direction only. It would seem I failed.
To overly simplify it: imagine a piece of quantum state is not observed at any point between the universal T0 and TNow. Further, imagine a decision made at TNow is effectively a measurement of that state. There is absolutely 0 way to say that the state was "in" that configuration "before" your measurement, it is 100% equally valid to say that your decision "caused" the state to assume that value, which would be interpreted as your choice causing a propagation backwards in time to the initial configuration. (The essay goes into more details around "No Hidden State" objections to this interpretation.)
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life. Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
To clarify my comment, I was attenuating to the causal progression of identity and referencing the physical dimension of that as it is less likely to dissolve into wasteful argument. Once we exist past a day boundary we don't get to be us today without an us yesterday. I admit that the lines of existence and self can be plausibly taken as very fuzzy and I don't want to debate any of that minutiae.
My point is that we are the intersection of what we are across all the domains of our being to whatever extent we exist at the times that we do. Confusing ourselves about what we mean by a person doesn't help.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate? If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
Isn't that basically the gist of TFA?
Can't find any appropriate acronym