Set up a debate

Moral truths exist independently of human opinion

Whether moral claims can be true or false in the way factual claims are, or whether they express attitudes, conventions, or choices.

Preserving a person's mind digitally would be a real continuation of that person

Whether a digital copy of a person's memories and personality would be that person, a new person, or no person at all.

Human beings have free will

Whether our choices are genuinely up to us, or whether they are determined by prior causes we did not choose.

You are the same person you were ten years ago

Whether there is a persisting self that underlies change, or whether identity over time is a convenient fiction.

Emotions are a better guide to action than reason

Whether we should trust our feelings or our calculations when deciding how to act, and whether the two can even be separated.

The self is an illusion

Whether there is a unified subject at the center of experience, or whether the sense of being someone is constructed by processes with no one behind them.

Animals have minds in the same sense humans do

Whether the difference between human and animal mental life is one of degree or one of kind.

We can be certain of anything at all

Whether any belief is immune to all possible doubt, or whether the most we can achieve is well-justified confidence.

Religious faith can be rational

Whether belief without conclusive evidence can be a reasonable stance, or whether faith by its nature is a failure of rationality.

We can know moral facts the way we know scientific facts

Whether ethics has a subject matter that can be discovered and known, or whether moral claims express attitudes rather than describe facts.

Human rights exist by nature, not by agreement

Whether rights are discovered features of human beings that hold everywhere, or human inventions that exist only where they are recognised and enforced.

Sufficiently advanced AI deserves moral consideration

Whether an artificial system could have interests that matter morally, and what we would owe it if it did.

Consciousness is nothing more than a physical process

Whether subjective experience can be fully explained by brain activity, or whether there is something about the mind that physics leaves out.

There is such a thing as objective truth

Whether some claims are true regardless of who believes them, or whether truth is always relative to a perspective, culture, or framework.

Science is the only reliable source of knowledge

Whether empirical science exhausts what can genuinely be known, or whether mathematics, ethics, introspection, testimony, and the humanities deliver knowledge of their own.