Responsibility is just a subjective value judgment, so people can be responsible for their actions whilst in reality they are wholly determined by an uncountable amount of variables. That is the problem with the free will vs determinism debate. It's not that we are drones, but the variables in day to day actions are near infinite and incalculable. So free will itself is a pseudo-problem for religious metaphysicians.
If you were clever enough you could probably get someone aquitted of murder though, a la Clarence Darrow.
Not sure if you're looking for anyone to persuade you otherwise, but I'll take a crack.I don't think anyone can help what they do. It's a horrible belief that I can't rid myself of. I'd like to think people decided to be nice or not. But I don't really think if you decide to be nice you ever could have decided otherwise. But the one thing keeping me sane about this issue is that I'm a renowned idiot, too lazy to read and even to think, so there's a good chance I'm wrong. And even if I am right it doesn't really matter.
"Debates" are something I sometimes indulge in when wasted to try and prove I'm clever or something equally as pathetic. I thought it was cocaine that turned me into a pontificating windbag but turns out booze can do the trick just as effectively.
Not sure if you're looking for anyone to persuade you otherwise, but I'll take a crack.
Part of the reason I'm reluctant to admit/assert characteristics about myself (be they "renowned" or not), is that doing such tends to reinforce them, in a way. "Reification", no? By continuing to treat something abstract as if it were real/true, it becomes easier and and easier to treat that something as if it were real/true.
Instead, you can acknowledge the vagueness of your identity, and that the abstract stuff we are trying to articulate does not play by the rules of logic our articulation plays by. That is, you leave the matter undecided, "superpositional", instead of collapsing its flutteriness into a single point, a single answer.
This is kinda what schizoanalysis is, only applied to yourself. And this doesn;t mean you must resist picking up on patterns you exhibit in thought, or action more broadly - but it does mean that you stop there, that you acknowledge that habit as nothing more than a habit, rather than inducing that the habit is revelatory of your One true nature, your characteristic essence.
Maybe some of the above can provide an offramp, maybe not.
I think "Oh god, take me now!" would be the only rational response she could make to that.Like, "you know singleton (f), something you said last night got me thinking, part of the reason I'm reluctant to admit/assert characteristics about myself, etc. etc."