http://www.salon.com/2014/12/28/the_tru ... lly_exist/
I also came across this a while ago, Sean Carroll explains the "compatibilist" position of Dennett, making the same point maybe a little more clearly:
http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blo ... -baseball/We talk about the world using different levels of description, appropriate to the question of interest. Some levels might be thought of as “fundamental” and others as “emergent,” but they are all there. Does baseball exist? It’s nowhere to be found in the Standard Model of particle physics. But any definition of “exist” that can’t find room for baseball seems overly narrow to me. It’s true that we could take any particular example of a baseball game and choose to describe it by listing the exact quantum state of each elementary particle contained in the players and the bat and ball and the field etc. But why in the world would anyone think that is a good idea? The concept of baseball is emergent rather than fundamental, but it’s no less real for all of that.
Likewise for free will. We can be perfectly orthodox materialists and yet believe in free will, if what we mean by that is that there is a level of description that is useful in certain contexts and that includes “autonomous agents with free will” as crucial ingredients. That’s the “variety of free will worth having,” as Daniel Dennett would put it.
It seems to me that a "hard determinist" like Sam Harris wouldn't actually disagree with this, and yet they certainly make it seem there is a lot of disagreement (Dennett does in particular). There seem to be a lot of semantic issues in these debates.