(May 27, 2015 at 12:03 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: I think free will is as real as anything else in mind, which is to say that it is an illusion. The mind creates a model of the world which includes real world objects, like ships and telephone poles, but it also creates a range of entities that only exist in the mind: pain, feelings, concepts, moral judgements. These make-believe entities are not 'as real' as ships and telephone poles, they exist only as elements of a model of the world that includes them. They are not 'real' in the sense of being as real as perceptions of ships and telephone poles. They are constructs of the mind. While they might 'appear' as real as ships and telephone poles, there is a better way of describing them than to say that they are 'real objects', and that is the language of the brain's neurology. A language in which objects like pain and feelings and will are constructed out of whole cloth inside the mind. They are illusions because they appear as natural features of the mental landscape, but they aren't natural features; they are mental constructs.
It seems to me you are describing us as beings who are fully immersed in the Matrix. But I always get a kind of philosophical Spidey-sense in situations like this: for if the brain isn't real in the whole-cloth sense that we look at it, then where and what is mind, really?
