I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewh

I think free will is fundamentally a bad term/model, independent of the truth value of what everyone means by that label. That said, I think you might be somewhat conflating free will and consciousness; it's perfectly cogent, for instance, that a provably deterministic robot might have subjective experience; and that after executing each pre-determined binary instruction, would be programmed to have a feeling of "I chose that instruction". I do think those who have a bias for materialism are overly eager to discard fuzzier subjectivities like free will, consciousness, even religious experiences and mystical states. There is obviously a sense in which Harry Potter is not real; but there is also a sense in which Harry Potter is more real than an arbitrary rock or tree, because as an ephemeral memeplex, that being altered planetary culture and created billions of dollars of economic activity. Just because a phenomenon lacks affordances for empirical measurement does mean it is necessarily absent from reality altogether. For an opposing view to naive materialism which is still firmly nested in rationalist thinking, see Donald Hoffman's "The Case Against Reality": https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality-20160421/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...