Is there any such thing as an absolute?

I'm still here - though I'm not absolutely sure of that - whether God exists or not.Maybe God gave you the choice to accept Him or maybe He forced you to "choose" what you had for breakfast. You don't know.

I appreciate the need for precise language which is really what I am looking for. It is revealing to deconstruct sentences and identify all of the predicates that they assume. It's a wonder that we can communicate at all with out attaching an end user agreement to every statement. Language falls way short of thought.If the goal is to understand the nature of things then knowing the truth is always better.

No. I understand what you are saying but I don't see any rational basis for your assumptions and projections.The idea of god seems to be the result of our search for absolutes. Its the carrot that we imagine on the end of the stick.

Well...what's the point of anything? What's the point of insisting that there is no way of knowing? I say that the point is so that we might know because knowing is better than not knowing.Also, I am not insisting. I am asking what you think so as to improve my perception of the idea. If I can add your perspective to mine then I can improve my picture. If the truth is better then it follows that being closer to the truth is better.

In order to maintain that some approximations are better than others perhaps? Verisimilitude is a reasonably widespread concept in the philosophy of science.Even if you cannot ever achieve truth, even if you cannot know what "truth" is, that doesn't stop some answers being better approximations to it than others.If you are going to talk about "approximations" you need to decide what it is you are approximating...... Right?

Maybe they are.
I'm not saying I know that they're not.
I'm saying I don't know. And, I'm also saying... that I don't think you know either Yes, our lives are full of information and experiences.
How does that, specifically, negate having a choice? I don't know... I'm not saying it definitely is. But you seem to be saying it definitely isn't... by implying that it isn't? That isn't enough for me to agree. A lot of sense. Because of the varying differences. There are averages and majorities and such for predicting human behaviour. But even the best predictions are still never accurate enough to say we are not making a choice.For your Coke and Pepsi example... in general most people do not always choose Coke or Pepsi. They may have a slight preference but still pick differently, sometimes even under the same circumstances.Is that because the stimuli are somehow changing and people are forced to pick differently?
Or is that because people are making fickle decisions about a fickle product but still making independent choices each time?I don't know.
But... so far you haven't shown that it's even likely to be "an illusion."
You've only shown that it could be an illusion.Well... I agree. It could be. Also... it might not be. I do agree with this, and it is nicely poetic, too.
But reality doesn't care if things are poetic to us, or if we are happy with the conclusions.
What if free will isn't made of sterner stuff? What if it's pretty loose and shitty? Does that mean it's not free will anymore just because it's not nicely poetic?I'm not ready to give up on it just because you say so.

Hi Omnivorous, I think it probably would be best (for clairty sake) when we discuss things like
free will on EVC we make sure to say it is a given that our sentient concious mind is operating under the influence of a googleplex of unseen parameters that lead up to a choice.For simplicity sake when I refer to free will I am talking about the kind that describes me taking a left or a right on a given street.We do have choices and we do select from them every waking hour of our lives. This ability to do so is what I call my free will.Edited by 1.61803, : for clarity sake* added

It's a safety device, to remind us that we're never "there"; we're still learning. That's what I'm saying: you can improve your picture but you can't (or shouldn't) "finish" it.What pisses me off is people saying something is absolute when they really mean "pretty close".

Right. I can see that.But... if "good" and "bad" are subjective and relative, and we are actually the ones who decide what is "good for us" and what is "bad for us"...Doesn't this make things a bit more complicated than you seem to be implying?If we aren't the ones deciding what's good and bad... who (or what) is?

"Better" approximations are more precise approximations, not necessarily more accurate approximations.If we're shooting at a target in the dark, we can tell by feel how closely our shots are grouped but we can't feel how close they are to the bullseye.

I think I was responding to Phat's notion that God gives us our choices - e.g. heaven or hell. My point was and is that if we don't think both choices are viable He isn't really giving us a choice at all.

My desk is 1.7543698765423410981666 centimeters longMy desk is about a meter and a half long.One of these statements is highly precise but a very poor approximation. The other statement is very approximate but far more accurate.Which of the two statements is the better approximation?Being roughly accurate trumps being precisely wrong.
It's accuracy that we should be aiming for. Without it precision is really rather worthless.

Not necessarily, as I said. Note my example of shooting in the dark: When you don't know how accurate you are it's better to be precise; you can make a precise approximation more accurate but one "accurate" data point might just be a fluke. On the contrary, it's usefulness that we should be aiming for. Precision can be adjusted toward usefulness.

Biblical creationists make highly precise calculations about the age of the Earth. Down to the number of days in some cases.Science tells us an age of the Earth that is nowhere near as precise as that.Which is the better approximation? Only if it is accurate. Being ever more precisely wrong is entirely pointless. Being ever more precise is only of value if combined with a degree of accuracy. More accurate theories are more useful......Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

The one that's more useful. No.If your shots are tightly grouped but three inches to the right of the bullseye, you only need to make a small adjustment in your sights to make your precise shots more accurate. On the other hand, if your shots are all over the target there's no easy way to improve either your precision or your accuracy. You seem to be thinking of accuracy in terms of proximity to "The Absolute Truth". I'm suggesting that we should think of accuracy entirely in terms of usefulness. A map is accurate if it gets you where you want to go, even if it depicts the earth as a plane instead of a dodecahedron.