Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

You/we also experience rabbits coming out of hats and cold poles.

Adding more doubt to non-free-will experiences serves well to justify my stance that nothing we experience is intrinsically more real than free will.

(The table is, as far as our sensory equipment can tell, flat. At our level of interaction - it is-. At some other level of interaction requiring some other set of senses or augmentations our experience ceases to be -as accurate-. At no point down this rabbit hole does the table become any less flat - because all flat is meant to convey is a particular arrangement at a particular level of interaction - and that's all that it could convey. Regardless, if you see the table as a collection of particles or as a flat surface - this won't have any effect on the table.)

And over the past few days, as we've discussed free will, I can say that viewing it as deterministic, indeterministic, or illusory has not affected my snack-aisle experience of freely choosing what I'm going to buy, or of freely choosing my method of hiding said purchase from my wife.

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Yes, they are real because they correlate to real phenomena in which our beings experience fluctuating physical states and term any slightest difference under concepts such as love, beauty, value, etc. This is, of course, due in large part to memories, that is, a capacity to look backwards into the past and forwards into the future, following "mental signposts" (sticking out from the "dirt" of biochemical processes) that guide us in our immediate environment.

Okay, so let me ask you this. Say you see a beautiful sunset. Does knowing that it isn't intrinsically beautiful, but that it is an instinctive emotional response to certain visual stimulus that makes us "see" beauty in it, not make that beauty unreal?

Or will you accept that "real for us" is no less real than the light itself?

And if they are illusions, should we not seek to dismiss them from consideration in living our lives? But wait. . . doesn't "should" itself imply free will? Does that mean that I'm deterministically bound to consider thinking that love, beauty, value and meaning have. . . meaning? Urk!

You are deterministically bound to the extent that you find the strongest reason affecting your disposition towards one or the other... hopefully one of those determinants is this post.

lol we all know the likelihood of that!