I agree, discussions like this are very good, and this topic has produced some healthy debate. It was my hope in starting it, since I don't have all the answers, and can only learn by looking within and communicating with others. Listening to and thinking about the impressions and experiences of other-selves helps me understand the mystery better. We are all unique, each a beautiful diamond in a vastness of existence.

I understand the hesitance to couch these ideas in dualistic terms. But that is the nature of the existence we currently inhabit. I too believe in the unity of things, that at some other level the dichomoties disappear. But we are limited by the language we have, and the concepts that pervade our existence, and thus we often have to talk dualistically, as that is the apparent nature of the reality we currently experience. In the end none of it matters. There is no right, there is no wrong, there is no polarity as at some point all will be reconciled in unity.

I dont think we will ever stop pondering..it's in our nature..people like us, we are philosophers..it's in our blood. I have always prefered the company of like minded people to have these types of dicussions with..doesn't matter where I go, at work, school, whatever..I always find those people..or they find me.

We are biological machines capable of free will. The argument need not go much deeper then that. When discussing ethics we should look at behavior from a perspective of free will. If we are to seek the mechanistic under printing of behavior we look at it like a machine. Neither is wrong. We are not entirely pre-programmed. Our genes do not regulate all our behavior, our environment is just as important and how we respond to that environment is also just as important.

^^good point.

There is no such thing as free will. The fly in your soup last week was always going to land in your soup, without variation, since the beginning of time. Likewise, the factors that influenced you to order the soup are unchangable. Every event has a cause, and every causal event must also have a cause. Analyzing a decision for evidence of free will is like rewinding a tape of a guy flipping a coin 100 times. During the flip, the results seem totally unpredictable. However, after the flip and upon review, we see that the coin always lands in the same way. It can't be changed without changing something about the man flipping it, which is of course impossible.

This is obviously inconsistent with a "first cause" theory of the beginning of the universe, but I'm willing to put the origin of everything on a back burner and say that determinism is consistent with what we do know.