What we call free will may simply be the experience of making choices whose causes we don't consciously control. Every decision is influenced by factors such as genetics, upbringing, environment, past experiences, brain chemistry, and the circumstances we're currently in. You can choose according to your desires, but you didn't freely choose the desires, personality, or experiences that produced that choice. If rewinding the exact state of the universe would always produce the exact same decision, then your choice was determined by prior conditions rather than being genuinely free.

Reflection proves that we can think about our choices, but it doesn't prove that we ultimately control the causes of those choices. Your brain evaluates reasons using your prior experiences, values, desires, genetics, and circumstances, none of which you originally chose. If those factors determine which option you ultimately select, then saying “I could have chosen differently” only means that you can imagine a different choice, not that you could have actually made it under the exact same conditions. I can still recognize your intentions and treat you with dignity without assuming that those intentions somehow exist outside the causal process that produced them. if your decision is completely determined by prior causes, then under exactly the same conditions you could not have chosen differently. But if your decision isn't determined by those causes, then what determines which choice you make? If the answer is nothing, that doesn't give you control; it makes the outcome arbitrary. So either the choice follows from causes you didn't ultimately choose, or it happens without sufficient determining reasons. Neither gives us the kind of ultimate authorship required for genuine free will. We can still judge intentions, protect people, and hold people responsible in a practical sense, but that doesn't establish that anyone is the ultimate author of their own choices.

The reversal doesn't show that the person escaped causation; it shows that new causes entered the process. They heard an argument, processed information, compared it with their existing beliefs, and changed their judgment. Their reasoning genuinely caused the change, but that reasoning itself arose from their brain, prior experiences, information, and circumstances. Calling the person “a cause” doesn't establish free will because determinism never says people aren't causes; it says their actions have causes. So the gap between desire and action doesn't create an independent free agent. It is simply the part of the causal process where deliberation happens.