I want to play.

I believe in God, I believe in free will, I believe in semi-objective morality, and I believe pistachio is the best flavor of ice cream. Surely that’s enough to provoke a dispute.

I don’t believe in God. I believe free will is situated in dasein. I don’t believe in objective morality. I believe chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream. But then I once believed conflicting things. And I may well change my mind again.

But then professing to believe something is true is not nearly the same thing as demonstrating that in fact it is true.

Uh, for example, universally?

I believe I have free will but many others may not.
I believe that chocolate ice cream is not universal. I have seen other substances.

I believe that intellectual steroids make people stupider.

Why? You are not dictating that others believe those things, you are merely stating beliefs. If any dispute a belief that is announced then their motive should be in question.

That’s just because you haven’t tried them.

I think I could demonstrate that free will exists, or at least, that the evidence compels any rational person to believe that it does. I think the case is less strong for God, but still stronger than for atheism. If you don’t see the truth of pistachio, then apparently God has hardened your heart and there’s no point in trying to convince you.

If you like, I’ll participate with you in a not-quite-a-debate thread, in which I initially start out in a neutral position in relation to free will (ie I will not even start the discussion with an understanding of what the term means, I’m completely neutral about its truth value and meaning), and you demonstrate that. I’d like to see that demonstrated. I can see how it can be demonstrated for certain definitions of free will that tend not to have the stronger connotations of the bigger ideas of free will, but I’d like to see it done for one of the bigger, more relevant, heavy definitions that carries with it all of the connotations that free will tends to carry (eg being the source of responsibility for example).

That sounds like fun- though I’d be curious to see how you’d play somebody who doesn’t know what ‘free will’ means- it seems the first few exchanges would just be me trying to find the proper synonym that in your vocabulary already. But yeah, having to define terms would put a refreshing spin on the old debate.

You start or I start?
Or should I let a random number generator decide?

If we’re starting tonight, it’s you, because I’m tired. If we’re ok waiting until tomorrow afternoon, I can start.

Here it is
I sometimes have a hard time keeping a debate/discussion civil, I’m not sure if it’s because I’m an ass hole or because I get easily riled up by ass holes and let myself get dragged down to their level. Let’s not do that. Let’s try to just be nice to each other.

Believing in something isn’t making much of an argument for it. In a sense your kind of concede the debate as soon as you admit it’s merely a belief.

Free will just means as free as you can manage to be. In the end even if you’re free to choose, and free from things you don’t like, you’re still bound by the options you have to choose from and sometimes you don’t like yourself so you’re fucked. So technically, there’s free will but only in the bliss of the ignorance of these simple facts about how basic things work.

Semi-objective morality? I might go along with, “morality has an element that is uniform through all interpretations of what morality is and that element establishes an objective standard for a definition of the word”, and the semi-it out by agreeing to, “but even then the moral judgements are made from individual perspectives and therefore there’s a subjective element as well”. Sure. But then you got some half and half, realistic view of things. How is that fun? Who wants to argue against it? I dunno man.

You’re dead on with the pistachio. I’ve got a bag of em here and I think Jello pistachio pudding should be a required meal for every American each day. Nothing to debate. On some occasions I get particularly lustful for the pistachio pudding and I’ll mix it up but not put it in the fridge and just drink it instead. Or at least sip a little off the top before you put most of it in the fridge.

Free will? You only realize it looking back. While you were free to make a decision and take a course of action, you only took one. How many times do we look back and say, “I wish I had taken another course of action.” At the time the decsion seemed as the best one, or the only one which could be made at the time, or not constrained like the others not taken. There is freedom retroactivelly, but at the time there was only one taken. That is not present freedom. I could will to take multiple routes, but usually all but one was abandoned. Or even if not, there was prioritization as to degrees of importance.

Freedom is a deconstructed idea of the past through the present,

As far as pistacchio ice cream is concerned, I can make myself believe I like it, but I’d rather have moccha any day.

Until science is able to fully unravel the mystery that is mindful matter, I don’t believe any of us can ever know for certain the extent to which matter [having evolved into “I”] either is or is not able to “choose” – to choose “freely” – one set of behaviors [course of action] rather than another. If you can’t at least admit that what does it really mean to tout “evidence” one way or the other? It’s still a mystery the hard guys are working on.

As for philosophers, they tend to “solve” things like this through the internal logic of their arguments: words telling us what other words must mean based solely on the alleged meaning of yet more words still.

Here’s how I approach it:
1] Joe says, “I believe in God.”
2] Jane says, “I don’t believe in God.”

I say to Joe, “what actual evidence do you have God does in fact exist?”
Joe provides what he construes to be evidence.
I say to Jane: “well, what do you think?”

So, I’ll be Jane here. You be Joe. What substantive evidence do you have that God does exist?

Language is the tool through which transcendence can arise out of the immenance. It is through transcendence that we prove the ultimate immenance of what we think substance is. Why go through the gyrations? Why create the world, if it was already there all along? In the beginning was the word, and besides God is not an old man sitting up above eating pistachio ice cream.

Er, are we actually going to be having these discussions in this thread? I thought this was just to set up such discussions. I’m more than happy to get into the God thing with you though.

You not only thought to set up these discussions, you actually did set them up. Moreover, You brought up God and pistacchio ice cream in the same token. So what is one to think? How can we expand on these quite different concepts, keeping in mind the impression one gets,as to their qualitative differences needing clarifiication?

In the end, God, pistachio ice cream and the free will debate are all made of the same thing. The real question is, “what is that thing?”

   In the end?  How about in the beginning? In the end I hate to think of the same, since I'd be licking God onm a cone?