Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

Okay, so each of us experiences differently than each other

Is there any other way?

, and neither of us experiences the universe as it really is (i.e. as a bunch of QM particles or maybe something even more subtle but as yet undiscovered). So where do we get off even talking about what is "real" and what isn't? By what criteria do we really establish the reality of something?

:kicks a rock:

Now you try. Next we'll take some pictures of the rock. We'll chip bits off and put them in a lab. Maybe..lets see what happens the the "rock" heaped up with explosives. This doesn't seem to be very difficult. In short, precisely as we already do.
(we may or may not be experiencing something "as-is", sort of a case by case basis, eh? In the case of "free will" though, I'd have to say that we aren't.)

Okay, and this is where I've been trying to go: the standard of reality is in all cases simply that something feels real to you. EVEN THOUGH we know that we do not experience Mom or a Ferrari as those things really exist in a purely scientific sense, we consider them perfectly real-- indisputably real, really.

We seem to be engaged in special pleading with regard to free will-- only IT can be said to exist if it represents the mechanism of the physical universe as we know it, right down to the functions of QM particles.

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I would say something is real, in a given reality, if it is available to be experienced by all potential observers in that reality.

I just pulled that out my arse, so it may need cleaning up

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I thought of another test. After slashing it with my chainsaw, if it's still in one piece, it's not real.

Cannot all humans observe the reality of free will, constantly and throughout the day?