The validity of an argument does not rest on the agency of the entity who made it. An argument put forward by a computer can be judged by its content just as much as an argument by some hypothetical entity with free will.

Your rejection on the basis of my claim that none of us have free will is logically unsound whether we have free will or not.

> Second absent free will, truth seeking has no more transcendent meaning or inherent value than a fly’s turd seeking. Love, wisdom, justice simply are, and are no better or worse than hate, ignorance or cruelty.

I agree with that. Nothing has any inherent meaning or value. The meaning or value in everything is merely the value we subjectively assign to it. That does not remove that value. The subjective experience is just as good or bad whether or not it's based on values we've merely assigned to it without any choice in the matter.

To me this notion that we need free will to value the feeling of freedom or the beauty of love, wisdom and justice is bizarre. The experience is the same whether or not the underlying choices are free or purely deterministic.

I'm a hard determinist, materialist, atheist, yet I spent a large portion of my youth writing goofy sentimental romantic poetry - the two are not in conflict; I can recognise love is a biochemical reaction following a chain of deterministic events and still feel it.

I think you've confused the argument.

There is no denial that the subjective experience of free will is real, even to a free will denier. That is, we're not talking about qualia. See the distinction of 'hard' free will.

So in fact there was no absence of subjective agency. But I get your point. You hold the belief that free will deniers are themselves automatons. A strange but expected reversal of conclusions--understandable, as yet it's more of that reflexive defensiveness on display.

And to your second point, for your statement to follow, you'll first have to show that truth seeking has transcendent meaning or inherent value in the first place. That sounds as tough to solve as the free will debate ;).

> There is no denial that the subjective experience of free will is real

I guess I am loathe to throw something so essential and universal to the human experience out the window.

I think many people get into verbal and philosophic contortions because like me they find it difficult to accept something which goes against their fundamental experience, and yet unlike me they're unable to let go of a materialist reductionist view of the universe.

> reflexive defensiveness

Reflexive - that is to say not controlled by me. ;-)

As to my second point, I cannot show that. I believe without proof that existence has meaning, justice, truth, wisdom are good and to be sought, and ignorance, slavery, cruelty are bad and to be rejected.

But we're not throwing anything out the window. We agree the experience of free will is real.

I just don't agree that the underlying reality of it is that there's anything "free" about it any more than e.g. a movie character has free will.

Yet that movie character will still make choices within their movie world that matters to the character, even though the choices are all illusory, and even the characters existence is illusory.

(I'd go much further and argue that we can't tell if space or time has any existence independent of a single instant of sentience, but it doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is that we experience it as if it has; the fundamental defence of philosophical materialism against philosophical idealism is exactly that: it doesn't matter; we have to act as if reality is as we sense it, whatever we know or believe we know about it)

I don't see the contradiction. I don't go around living my life thinking that what I do don't matter because the choices aren't free. They feel real and feel free, and the consequences are real whether or not the choice was truly free.

The only thing it changes is perhaps how I look back at things, and some views on morality:

I try not to have regrets (I do sometimes, because whatever my views I can not override all feelings, and would not wish to anyway), because while I may wish I had acted differently, I am pretty good at accepting that I couldn't have. I can try to act differently in the future, and hope I actually will, but what happened in the past, happened.

At the same time I can feel angry about how someone else acts but recognise that while that may inform how I act around them in the future because it may say something about how they will act in the future, it feels immoral to me to seek vengeance (that doesn't mean I can't feel a strong urge to, because the feelings are still real).

> As to my second point, I cannot show that. I believe without proof that existence has meaning, justice, truth, wisdom are good and to be sought, and ignorance, slavery, cruelty are bad and to be rejected.

And that's entirely fine, and I would largely agree because it's almost entirely orthogonal to the question of whether free will is real or just an illusion.