However, there is always -choice-.

I seem to be ‘deterministic’ in my views, but ‘incremental’ in my philosophy. While I don’t believe people can operate outside of their natural potentials, I think we often vastly underestimate those potentials as are found in people. Whether or not free will is an illusion would seem to be irrelevant when one considers that we are grounded in subjective experience. The only internal limits that guide us are the ones we are capable of conceiving. Hmm, it’s hard to define in words.

For example, I don’t believe I have changed much as a person from when I was a child – and I am glad of that! – though I’ve certainly matured and become more intelligent since then. When I was young I didn’t believe in limits, and lived to challenge and exceed them. While I now realise they must exist in an intellectual capacity, I still don’t let them define me. The only way to discover your limits is to continually try to surpass them.

So what I’m gathering here is that some now refer to these differences as being between the “fixed” traits of entity theorists – who tend to respond to difficulty by relinquishing agency – and “malleable” traits of incremental theorists – who tend to react by reasserting their agency. Rather than theorists, I’d think they could simply be referred to as strategists. Behavioral traits are both fixed and malleable – the differences involving a variety of circumstantially determined degrees. These same people also talk about the traits stemming from theoretical beliefs, sometimes self-chosen, relative to free will and deterministic conceptions, but I’d argue that the “theories” in question are more likely determined and or generated by the initial extent of flexibility in the heritable traits.
If, as they argue, there’s cognitive construction of belief involved independent of this element of causation, I’d argue that a prominent factor in this would be the effect of the cultural environment in which the otherwise internal forces were operative.
In other words a deterministically religious society develops a range of predictive behaviors consistently different from those found in a society that stresses freedom of thought and action, yet the usual dominance hierarchy strategies will still prevail.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by sandygautam: continuing the free will debate my new mouse trap post on why Neo keeps peristing http://bit.ly/7p06Uh...