Do you believe in free will?

[genkaus]

Alright, instead of fighting over the semantics of the argument, I'll alleviate your worry by addressing the subject which is created by the mind as a 'model of reality'. The true material world, which you would equivocate to reality is independent of the mind, as established by premise 1, but the world which we perceive exists within the confines of the mind - inside of our model of reality.

No, no, no, no, no. Semantics is important here because a lot of confusion and errors are caused because of incorrectly using them.

Consider the phrase "the world which we perceive". Here the world is the object and the action being taken is perception. The consequence of this action is "the model of reality". There is a chain of causation here: world - perception - model of reality. In the first link of the chain, there is no involvement of the mind. The world is therefore independent of it. At the second link, mind comes in. It is the mind that is doing the action of perceiving. It is, therefore, the model of reality that exists within the confines of our mind - not the world we are perceiving. It is the consequence of the process that exists within our mind, not the object of it.

I feel that we are arguing over the same concept here. I agree that a true material world exists, and that we perceive parts of that world - although to what extent we can never be certain. The argument is not over whether the material world exists, it is whether free will exists. My assertion is that we perceive our existence within our models of reality, but our minds are external from this model of reality and thus give us free will within it. Our perceptions do reflect the true material world, I believe, but the model of reality we experience is just our bits of perception pieced together.

This sounds more or less correct. I guess we can establish some of the statements here as what we both accept upto this point.

1. True material world exists, and that we perceive parts of that world.
2. Our perceptions do reflect the true material world, I believe, but the model of reality we experience is just our bits of perception pieced together.
3. Our minds are external from this model of reality.

I've a little problem with this statement:
"we perceive our existence within our models of reality"

As you established earlier, our mind is basically what we are. Therefore, our mind (and therefore us) is outside the models of reality. How can we exist external to the model of reality and still perceive our existence within it? This may be an error of wording, where you are actually trying to say conceptualize instead of perceive.

Now we have established some basic premises that we agree on, you can go ahead and justify how those premises lead to free-will within the model of reality created and how is that of any use to us in the physical reality.

Now that we've sorted the semantics of the conversation I think you'll find that my statement holds. The mind creates the models of reality which we exist within.

Except for the last part about existing within something you create. I'd say that you exist in the actual reality and just as you create a model of reality, you also create an "idea of you" or a "model of you" that exists within that model.