[colordrops]

No, I'm not. Can you be more precise in what you mean by "causative factors"? Without further context, and based on my understanding of the world, virtually anything internal or external to a person could cause them to be more or less skilled at something. It contains everything, and so seems that your statement could be interpreted that genetics and everything else in existence are one in the same.

[tnzm]

You asked what was the difference between my statement (that genetics is not more special than other causes of being more or less skilled at something) and the statement that "all is one, separateness is an illusion". I answered that the difference between these two statements is arbitrary, which I still believe to be the case. Apologies if something else happened to you.

My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.

Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.

I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?

EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.

In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol

EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.

[spiralx]

> My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.

The confusion is in the difference between proximal and ultimate causes, the rest of the discussion is over the ultimate cause of certain phenotypic features being down to genetics, some other mechanism or not significant at all. You've then said "all these different things are just proximate causes and [because free will doesn't exist] the ultimate cause is the laws of physics" to which people have unsurprisingly gone "what the hell does that have to do with anything?" because, well, it doesn't.

The fact that the ultimate cause of me taking a dump is "the laws of physics" doesn't mean the proximal cause wasn't me 'deciding' to go to the loo, and the fact that you can always say "the laws of physics" (or some higher power) is the cause doesn't make talking about higher level causes any less useful.

I don't believe in free will but its such a good trick that you act as though it were true almost 100% of the time, and talking about my 'decisions' as causes is useful the same as talking about 'genetic' and 'environmental' is useful. We talk about the causes of the Big Bang usefully despite time only coming into existence when the Big Bang happened :)

[TheSpiceIsLife]

What sprang to my mind when I read the arbitrarily response is that you have equally little control over the genes you’re born with as you do the place, time, family, society, economy, technology, and culture you’re born in to.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

Also, I meant to add:

> How is this any different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion"?

> It's not arbitrary. "Other causative factors" is boundless.

These are distinctly different lines on inquiry. One is an inquiry to in the illusory nature of separateness, the other is an inquire in to the boundless nature of causative factors.

[tnzm]

Wow, thanks! That's a wonderfully succinct way of putting it.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I’m constantly shocked and entertained by the lack of internal-consistency of what people say and write.

When we don’t even understand ourselves what hope is there we will understand other people? It’s definitely an ongoing process anyway.