If free will was not real

[bennyboy]

-again, it doesn't matter.  The failures, real or percieved...of anothers position are -irrelevent- as regards an assessment of your own.  If you say you have free will, but cannot show it or coherently explain or describe it..it doesn't -matter- that I think you don't have it, and it doesn't matter whether or not I'm a physical monist, or that the physical monist position is unsatisfying to you.  The problem isn't what I think (or what you think)..it's what you can't do.  

You think "all we've got" is the physical monist world view. I think we've got a lot more than that. We have direct experience, for example. Now, while I'm leery of source attributions ("I get the willies so God."), there are some experiences which are self-evident: the existence of the self, for example, or the experience of what redness is like.

The question is whether free will is a source attribution, in which case the experience of it cannot render a useful truth statement, or whether "free will" is a label for something which is self-evident. Your position is that however I feel about it, we know enough about the physical reality of the universe to know that the sense of freedom cannot represent truth, at least in an ultimate sense.

But no idea or experience represents the kind of truth you are talking about, in actuality. We have experiences, inferences, symbols about them, and systems of thought about them. But the human agency necessarily precedes whatever we think we "know." In arguing against free will, you are essentially arguing against the concept of self. Because if there's no free will, then all human pursuit for knowledge represents the Universe exploring itself. But then. . . feel that lurking Deism there?

Yes, that's it. Your argument against the free will of human agency is an implicit argument for the Universe as Deity. Good job.