Is free will real?

[bennyboy]

Couldn't I say of my ideas and memories that SO MANY are related to this mythical, illusory "self" that this relationship is sufficient to say the self is real? That is, that the self is the keystone which holds all ideas about the world into a coherent web, rather than allowing every experience I've ever had to remain discrete, unrelated, and therefore useless as part of a greater system of thought?

You're defending one poorly defined entity with an even more poorly defined entity? Say it ain't so. An adequate definition of the self has eluded philosophers since time immemorial.

My argument from the beginning has been that the anti-free-will camp are cherry picking. Either we accept the human myth as a context in its own right, by which some aspects of reality may meaningfully be defined, or we go full-on materialist, and abandon all these abstractions.

It doesn't make sense to me to abandon free will and still pretend that the idea of the self matters, or that there are such things as meaning or beauty.

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Okay...no joke, I walked into my daughters room and I hear this come from the set -"Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, he is as real as love or beauty. How dreary the world would be if...."

Benny, you been moonlighting?
(hahaha, now the credits are rolling and the soundtrack is reiterating that point, but adding hope to the list of things that Santa is as "real as" - I need to find the remote so I can share this gem.....)

I think it's great. In a literal sense, you and I are no more real than Santa Claus is. We are, all three, symbolic representations, and no more, of some aspects of experience and humanity which have become memorable to us.