If free will was not real

[bennyboy]

Here's the thing for me. Rhythm, you are seeing the physical world as black-or-white. In other words, you expect mutually exclusive views to be one-right, one-wrong. However, there's much about the Universe that doesn't play by this rule. It seems to me that at least some things in the Universe resolve down to truth values based on the perspective you take, or on the method you use to make the resolution.

Is a photon a particle or a wave? Yes. No. Not really. Kind of. Both. Neither.

If you look at it from the perspective of brain chemistry, I think you could have a reasonable expectation of determinism, implying that fee will cannot be anything more than a label for a very complex but completely deterministic process. That, clearly, is your position.

But the problem is that this is not the only perspective. An introspective view allows a subjective agent to experience for itself its own nature. I can know what its like for me to experience "redness," and no matter how much you talk about this or that brain function, part, or process, you cannot contradict what I know through experience-- because human agency is defined subjectively, not objectively.

The physical monist view, we must remember, isn't reality. It's an idea about the nature of reality. When you try to squeeze the reality of human experience into a box the shape of your world view, you might as well insist that light "can only" be a particle. It makes perfect sense in logical terms, but insisting that apparent paradox is necessarily false is to demand that the Universe not be as it really is.