You know how they say, "he has his father's nose," or "she has her mother's blue eyes?" Think that, but instead of physical traits, think personality traits. OK, not much different. Now switch it from nuclear relatives to friends and acquaintances. Now you have an interesting story.
I'd like to say a little bit about how I believe I am made up. Throughout my childhood my family has moved a lot. Because of this, I've lived in and experienced many different environments and I've met many different types of people. Strangely enough, I've befriended all sorts of people. And I've also learned to dislike all sorts of people. However, something I noticed is that much of who I am comes from everyone else. In a way, my personality traits are a mash-up of the personality traits of everyone I've met and become acquainted with in my life. Most importantly, my parents and brother are a big part of that. Then again, this should be pretty obvious.
Many psychological studies have supported the idea of "emergentism." By "emergentism" I am, in fact, referring to the psycholinguistic theory pertaining to the onset of language in early human development. The idea is essentially that children don't necessarily come out of the womb with innate qualities that make them automatically capable of all the faculties of language. Instead, it argues that infants are linguistically deprived and as a result learn everything they know from what they perceive (including grammar, vocabulary, and even register).
Anyway, enough of my linguistic rant (because I had to), but this is the same idea with which I'm trying to make a connection to personalities. Like language is learned from whomever is around the deprived stimulus, just the same, personalities are complex mixtures of the personalities that we encounter throughout our lives. Whether there is a certain "critical period" when we stop absorbing linguistic traits or personality traits is still a huge debate and we may never know the answer.
However, this is really quite the paradox. If the language/personality of an individual is a combination of everyone else's, then you can't simply argue that humans are born with a blank slate. And if they are, not only is that truly a phenomenon in itself, but it also means that the very essence of human nature stems from literally nothing but what we experience in our natural environment. Even then, we require tools to analyze and synthesize these experiences uniquely to create our own identity. Perhaps this is what the earliest humans went through. Perhaps our understanding of the world and our complex personalities are made up of the simple knowledge, discoveries, and qualities of the earliest peoples. Perhaps I've proven human evolution philosophically.
Perhaps I was wrong that you can't simply argue that humans are born with a blank slate, but that it is possible. Perhaps it is possible that humans are born with preprogrammed personality beta-types that, when tampered with, expand into a mature and interesting person (usually).
Well, we do know one thing for sure: Chomsky was wrong. We are not robots.
This strangely reminds me of that year I dressed up as a television for Halloween.
Photo credit: http://www.halloweencostumes.com
