Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

In short, you accept the reality of emergent phenomena on the level on which they appear without the desire to go all reductionist on them?

That also means you define them by their "phenomenology" ("a chair is whatever is recognized by the human brain as something that conforms to the general consensus of what a chair is"). Am I completely lost here or is that the direction in which you're going here?

The brain itself is a complex conglomerate, and the idea that it is a singular "thing" is only an idea, not representative of any non-arbitrary physical reality. I'd argue the concept of "thingness" is itself no less illusory than free will: we are imposing the idea of individual unity onto a collection of practically infinitely many particles, none of which imply unity, and none of which we can even directly perceive.

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Then they exist within the subatomic world - as demonstrably as you found comfort and loving support in the collection of stuff you call mom.

Free will exists / does not exist in this same way. It's a label for part of our human experience, and it is meaningful to us, so it "exists within the subatomic world." But it cannot be found there outside the context of experience. You can't find "comfort particles" floating around the universe, nor any particular collection of particles representing "comfort," except those ones we dub so. Well, any thing which exists only because we say it does must be called illusory IMO.

Agreed, but that doesn't make our ideas (or experiences) any more real. Many of our experiences are demonstrably -not real-...many of our ideas are hilarious bullshit. I distinctly remember being a pillowy fog last night. This dreaming business is also incontrovertible in human experience. A metal pole is colder than the air, on a chilly day - also incontrovertible in human experience. Are these two just as real as free will, and for the same reasons? How real is that...then?

You are pretty sure the pole exists. But where does "pole-ness" exist? How do you know it's a pole at all? The thing is-- it's only a pole in the context of your human experience of it. That idea of unity-- that this particular collection of QM wave functions collectively represent a "thing," is itself of and from the mind exclusively. It is therefore illusory, in the same way that free will is.