i suppose a lot of good things have happened to me in the past five days. despite the horrid invocations, qualifying exams are going rather smoothly. i wriggled out of forgetting to mention someone in a talk with minimal pain. i got some more good music. i found a few more games useful for spanning the set of game-moods i have. i got tetris attack. i spend saturday gardening with c., which was lots of fun.
i wonder if we come pre-packaged with roles. i won't bore you with the technical details, but linguists are pretty damn sure we come pre-packaged with a framework for language to fit into (syntax, etc..) so why not roles? i mention this in regards to c., who is clearly assuming a big-sister role in my life. i grew up sibling-free, but one theory would posit that the roles never went away; they just hung around waiting to be filled, much like the soulmate (or whatever you want to call it) role, or role-model role, or authority-figure role.
this theory doesn't seem to pass occam's razor, though, which is a pity. a clearly simpler explanation is the fact that i have a conception of these roles from society which allows me to fall back on classical notions of how to deal with this new type of relationship.
speaking of roles, i've been thinking a fair amount recently about the applicability of reasons for doing things. specifically, whenever we are accused of something, we always attempt to rationalize -- we give a bunch of reasons, with the inherent assumption being that given those reasons (which are out of our control, perhaps) it is entirely reasonable/logical/optimal to act in the manner in question. in its most common form, this is just the question of whether becoming a drug dealer can be mitigated by the fact that you grew up in a society which encouraged drug dealing -- do we lay the blame on the individual, or on the society?
i feel the need to take a hard-line stance on this one way or the other (free will versus determinism?), and, perhaps surprisingly, i will side with free will. we lay the blame on the individual because part of the individual is the society. it is wrong to say that the influences of society have nothing to do with the individual; they may have shaped the individual into one that will commit this behavior, but the fact remains that the individual is one with these behavioral tendencies, etc.. it's the same individual regardless of how they got there.
it's true that the previous path can shed light on how the individual will behave in the future; if i'm doing X because of peer pressure, then i'm less likely to do X in the future when transplanted than i am if i have been doing X despite peer pressure in the opposite direction. but i think this is a small effect, because i think people easily pick up enduring action patterns that last even upon transplant. in addition, by letting the individual plead relative innocence (and i'm not really talking about crimes at all here; i don't mean "innocent" in the judicial sense or anything like that) we're bolstering the strength of the societal schema.
in conclusion, i believe that the individual is wholly responsible for their actions, because they have been used as a vehicle for any indirect influences, and as the vehicle have absorbed these influences. to put it another way, if i take a robot and program it to kill people, we would have no qualms about killing the robot or otherwise impeding its lifestyle. that's one end of the spectrum. at the other end is the one where the robot has full intentionality, and in this case we would also have no qualms about treating the robot in accordance with its action. in real life, you're always between the two in cases like this, but since both ends of the spectrum indicate the same thing -- that the individual should be dealt with in response to their actions -- the limiting cases go a long way towards justifying the general.
if i'm not responsible for my actions, you should not care about preserving my immunity from their consequences, since i will continue to be so manipulated. if i am, then i deserve the consequences directly as their sole effector. the truth lies somewhere in between, which just means that there are both elements of danger, and there's no reason they won't come together in the same proportions later since there's clearly precedent.
a sobering thought.