What do we do while deciding if free will exists?

[bennyboy]

 I'm arguing that most of what it is like to be human is not less real than free will.  If free will is nothing, so is beauty.  So is goodness.  So are honor, morality, etc.

Yeah..yeah...and I've commented on the silliness of immediately falling to such statements before.   I don't think that I have to take your free will to have any of that -in fact I know that I don't.....but if I did..oh well, so what if they all were nothing? 
I'm afraid that if this "free will or you can't have x" is the best free will has going for it...it's in a pretty sorry state. I could probably replace "free will" with some other thing and you'd be able to recognize all of the ways to rip that statement to shreds without any help from me. Here's a hint....my substitute is invisible and begins with a "g".

I'm not sure why you have discomfort differentiating between the reality of being human and the physical reality underlying the universe.  They aren't the same.  A desk is real-- but physically speaking, it's not real in the way that it's real for me when I touch it and look at it.  Light is real, too, but physically speaking, it is not real iln the way that it's real for me when I experience it.

The "as I experience things" of qualia is always different than the physical reality.  So how do we treat this fact?  Do we just sweep it under the rug with a red herring: "people are physical, too, and so are our minds"?  But this doesn't address the fact that what we think is real and what is "really, really real" are already known not to be the same at all.

I don't much care if free will is "really, really real."  It's real in the context of the human experience of life, and that is the context in which I live out my existence.

Let's say I have a decision to make-- among the various candies in the candy aisle. I experience desire, then I look at the different candies and experience my emotional reaction to each one. I go back and forth until one of the candies really catches my fancy. I choose that candy, buy it, and eat it. Was this a process of free will? Well, if not, I didn't actually make a decision. Nor was there even a "me," by which I mean a free-willed agent capable of arbitrating decisions. There was just the awareness of a deterministic process, and the "decision" was illusory because my choice was inevitable. The joy of eating the candy was equally illusory-- there's no "joy" in the universe; it's just a word I give to mechanical processes.

In other words, a view of the human experience without free will means that each of us is here purely as an observer: watching a virtual movie, in essence. But that view of human experience doesn't really describe it very well. It seems to me very much that I'm an active participant.