Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

Seeing as how close we are I don't think it's much of a projection. Apes sense a shiny red car, it's unlikely that monkeys will miss it.

"The shiny red thing" is a ferrari. They're throwing feces at it, in your example...so clearly it works and exists in both of our contexts, the car's existence doesn't depend upon any "human context" in the same way that the existence of a termite mound doesn't depend on a "termite context".

Nobody's disputing the existence of anything in this thread-- even free will. What is under dispute is the degree to which things exist as we experience them. The argument is that free will does NOT exist as we experience it-- a belief based not on our experiences, but on ideas we have about the nature of the universe and its constituent parts, the rules of which we must necessarily follow. In other words, since no part of the physicalist model of the universe allows for true freedom, we take that free will, which FEELS real, is not "really real"-- it is illusory.

I think we have to agree to disagree about what makes complex experiences "real" to an observer. You see a shiny red object, the monkeys see an object in the same point in space, and to you, this represents a shared experience. I see the ideas and feelings connected to the object, and know that monkeys can never share those ideas and feelings, and see that the experience of "Ferrari" cannot be shared with that species. Both species see shiny red objects, and those objects are real. But only people can really see "Ferrari."