> It seems to me to require a decent amount of faith in the idea that only matter exists to conclude that consciousness and free will must be illusory. Why onl

> It seems to me to require a decent amount of faith in the idea that only matter exists to conclude that consciousness and free will must be illusory. Why only matter? My default position (of which I'm not entirely convinced of!) is that there are only physical things, not that there is only matter. So if consciousness and free will are physical phenomena of some kind, that makes things logical again. But if they are physical, then surely they follow physical rules, and need to somehow interact with the rest of physics. This again leaves no gap for there to be a divine kind of free will, one that is extra-physical and capable of overriding cause and effect. When I say that free will is illusory, I mean it in this sense: I don't see a logically coherent way in which free will could be non-physical and outside of the usual cause-and-effect chain. ** I did mean Libet, thanks for the references.