Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

LOL no! It's REALLY beautiful to me in that moment. There's no "instrinsic" beauty except in that sense that X causes Y in individual Z at the sight of X and Z calls it beautiful... and then tries to copulate with it. So, yes, it's real, in the same way that Zebras have what we call stripes. They have a color configuration that invokes intense debate: are they white or black? I don't see how things are unreal simply because they're evaluative; values are real but they're not absolute or objective. This is all aside from free will, which is simply not an accurate formula of anything in the real world except perhaps a sense that involves a deep lack of awareness in regards to our infinite ignorance.

I see a sunlit mountain range, and call it beautiful-- because in the context of living as this particular human beaing, sunlit mountain ranges are really beautiful. I know it to be so, because I can see the beauty as clearly as I can see the color red. I then decide which peak I will walk to next: A or B. I'm at liberty to choose either, so I "listen" to my feelings, I consult my memories, I check the time, and I make my choice. That is the exact description of the exercise of free will.

I'm not sure what this "accurate formula" stuff is all about. Do you have an accurate formula of the self? I'm pretty sure you do not: in fact, it's not to be found anywhere, to be measured by anyone/anything, or even to be precisely defined in terms that COULD make the self objectively observable. And yet few, even here, are willing to go so far as to say that the self is an illusion. How about the idea of reality itself? Is it non-arbitrarily defined or even definable? What are your criteria for establishing whether an abstraction represents reality or not?

My answer to this last question is to accept that there's no demonstrably objective truth that holds true for all contexts, and take things as they present themselves in different contexts: particles in the context of QM, continuous surfaces in the context of classical mechanics and everyday observation, and free will in the context of living out my life as a human being. As you argued, the particle-ness of QM particles doesn't take away from the truth that my desk is flat; but I'd add that the REASON it doesn't is because of the shift in context.