Are we all born the same as humans and then have our characters..: Philosophy Forums

Are we all born the same as humans and then have our characters..

MakinItHappen
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Posted 07/15/09 - 04:55 PM: Subject: Are we all born the same as humans and then have our characters..	#1
....built in to us; through influences? Are we born a blank canvas with our personalities formed by our parents input, schooling, education, society (friends), role models, music, and materialism as well as the positive and negative experiences we encounter in life? Do we all keep growing/changing as we go through life due to the above? Naturally genetics must also inevitably play a part; but to what extent? Take this for example; I have two cousin brothers, one year apart, they were raised by my auntie and uncle within the same house, neighbourhood, grounding, music influence and all that other malarkey... yet they couldn't be more distinctly different from each another. How do you go about explaining this? If its a mixture of influences and genetics that form a person's overall personality, why are brothers and even twins so often different in many ways? Is it most realistic to suggest the foundations to our personality are formed from the day we are born to the tender age of 1/2? May be pushing it further than that and saying 6? After all we are @ our most impressionable in these years. What about soul? Is our soul born from the day we are born? Is soul something you only truly hold when you've discovered/found yourself as a person / individual? Or is it something only black R&B singers can possess? Lol Edited by MakinItHappen on 07/15/09 - 06:02 PM

swstephe
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Posted 07/15/09 - 06:45 PM:	#2
That's the second time I heard the phrase "cousin brothers". I hope that doesn't mean your parents were siblings, or else I don't understand that term . I dated a fraternal twin. She and her sister were about as different as you could get. One had blue eyes, the other green. One was left-handed, the other right-handed. One was an anal-retentive conservative, the other one was a hippy lesbian leftist. When I knew them, they were both living in the same home, as they had done since birth. What they shared seemed to be what most siblings shared, which is a set of cultural family rituals, (like throwing the pasta to the ceiling to check if it was done. I think personality depends a lot on identity and values. These twins developed based on a long-forgotten decision of how they would encourage acceptance in their family and social groups. This develops in parallel with values. Soul is usually considered a religious term, so it depends on the religion. In sciences, however, "soul", is often used as a synonym for consciousness. In some cultural groups, it relates to the level of emotional attachment to social identity.
Ethics is the measuring of morality. Morality is the measuring of good. Good is the measuring of benefit. Benefit is the measure of values.

bassman
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Posted 07/18/09 - 08:54 AM:	#3
With respect to swstephe's comment about fraternal twins, I only need point out that fraternal twins do not share the exact same DNA, like identical twins, hence their differences. The fact that any two siblings can be so different argues for the importance of genetics, or the effect of nature versus nurture on temperment and personality. The nature vs. nurture issue is a false one in that both have been established as determining personality and human development.

G.E.B. <3
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Posted 07/18/09 - 11:33 AM:	#4
I think nurture plays a bigger role in personality than nature does. I feel like if we did have a pair of newborn identical twins, and seperated them at birth, one being raised by an upper class proper family in the hills and the other being raised by a redneck (no offense intended) family somewhere in Tennessee, then respectively one would turn out to be a proper child of an upper class family and the other would have terrible teeth and terrible grammar skills. Then again if we had a pair of fraternal twins which were raised in the same household, but one amazingly good looking and the other...well....wasn't quite that good looking, then peers and others would most likely treat the children differently, ultimately effecting the personalities of the children. I don't know...just some opinions and examples.

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