Is free will real?

[Angrboda]

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.

I think you're creating an unnecessary dichotomy. In this context, I view something as an illusion if it appears as one thing, but in reality is something else. Just as I know that David Copperfield can't make an elephant disappear, it may appear as if he has done so. In that sense, I suspect many of these things — free will, self, consciousness — are illusions, but we lack the backstage pass to see how they are done. Nonetheless, in different contexts, it may make sense to treat them as illusions, while in other contexts we can just sit back and enjoy the show. If free will is an illusion, it makes no sense to treat a person as if it were real when it comes to things like punishment; that would be cruel and unusual. And in other contexts, such as mental illness and depression, it would be counter-productive and cruel not to acknowledge the limits of free will and the degree to which our behavior is determined. The very treatment of mental illness implies some illusory qualities to free will. Still, in our day to day lives, since we can't see behind the curtain, we must treat the illusion as real; anything else is paralyzing. So to argue that we must choose between the illusion and the reality is to ignore that we can embrace both and still be rationally reasonable. This is not to admit that the context in which the illusion is real should have equal status with other contexts; perhaps the personal context is the limit of what we should consider real.