One of the most basic things to understand about free will is that the whole paradox of it derives from the confusion of ontological levels. Specifically, the domain in which free will exists is NOT the same domain where we consider atoms and planets and handshakes to exist. Thus I see it as completely unnecessary to try to reconcile the feeling of free will with the determinism of material reality. That's a red herring, a false comparison of two things which cannot be properly compared. They describe things which exist in completely separate domains. In such separate domains, the "rules" are not necessarily analogous because the elements of the domain have very different natures, being from different ontologies. By this I do not simply intend to throw out the whole inquiry as moot, but rather I use this to be clear about how to go about making some sense of it.
Another thing to realize about it is that there is a temporal and epistemological pitfall which tends to surround the idea of free will itself. For example, we need to be careful about how the idea of freedom relates to our ideas of the future, present, and past. Our perspective on the future is defined by the possibility we see there, and this means it's a statement of what we feel we do not know but can perhaps partly imagine. Our experience of the present as itself cannot be consciously considered, but rather only experienced. There's no contemplating the present except in the deepest sense of experiencing (not contemplating consciously) our identity with it and everything that goes on without boundaries. Our perspective on the past is actually a type of experience which is ontologically downstream from the present. This is also true of our experience of the future. Contemplating the past is a process of comparing the wake of our own past experience to the feeling of our current experience. We look at what we experienced in the past as factual, true, and epistemologically determined.
What this means is that freedom is a description which only applies to that which we do not know, i.e. the anticipated or projected future. Freedom is usually defined as a feeling about or disposition toward the future, where our sense of what could be predominates. Where uncertainty about that future exists, only there can free will be experienced. Remember, all feelings, such as freedom, exist in the present when contemplating something in the subjective domain. Ironically, we do not believe we have free will to change the past, and yet that is in fact where free will has the most actual freedom and power. I know this seems absurd at first, but that's only because we tend to be mistaken about the nature of the past, as if it were in itself real in an objective sense. That is demonstrably not the case, and the trick all stems from understanding just what it is to contemplate or observe the elements of the subjective mental domain. That process is not the same as experiencing our senses, which is how we traditionally think of being closest to reality.
To put it together, freedom is the contemplation of multiple possibilities which we believe we are empowered to enact by our will. It should not be surprising to realize that there are many possibilities available to us in how to interpret and encode the past, just as there are many possibilities available to us in how to propose or project the future. All these operations, the imagining, the projecting, the interpreting, the encoding, are processes performed by a mind, manipulating the observations it makes of its own states.
My freedom cannot be the cause of results I contemplate in choosing, because the feeling of freedom is downstream from those possibilities; freedom is the feeling of being aware of multiple possible futures in which I feel I have an influence in selecting the future.
The only real states freedom contemplates via memory (as used here) are downstream from experience, and the contemplation is a process which is even further downstream. Because freedom is downstream from the possibilities which experience presents, it's not correct to say that freedom exercised as will can be the cause of the results which are contemplated. This is for a couple of reasons:
First, the results intended within the experience of freedom are not real, but rather imaginations of what could be, i.e. possibilities. These proposed results are not actual outcomes, so they themselves cannot be caused by the free will we are tracing here. They are in fact upstream from the choice, imagined possibilities serving as input to a choosing process. Then what actually happens is that downstream from the choice, will is enacted and things happen in the world. Then downstream from those happenings are our experiences of those happenings. And then downstream from that is an interpretation of the experience.
Remarkably, during this interpretive stage, the mind does a correlation operation and it compares the intended results (the old possibilities) with the experienced results (new experiences) and makes a judgment about to what degree they seem to match each other. When that judgment is interpreted as a match, the mind typically tends to tie the prediction and the result together as if they were one, collapsing out the time and processes which occurred in between.
Thus the key distinction is to realize that intended results, which are hypothetical and epistemic, are not at all "real results" which we perceive after the fact of our choosing and exercising our intent.
And in doing this, the mind cheats itself out of a key bit of understanding about itself. It short circuits the revelation of actual reality to make the claim (for good reasons, by the way), that the actual experienced and interpreted result stands in factually in the subjective understanding where the proposed result had been. Only by this identification process can it possibly appear that the free choice caused the intended result. In fact the free choice was a reaction to, not a cause of, the intended result. This one trick of the mind, which is a worthy and generally valid shortcut for most practical purposes, introduces the confusion of free will in the game of real cause and effect. All this to say that free will cannot possibly cause intended effects. Rather it can only ever cause actual results which we can then choose (or not) to intentionally identify with our past contemplated possibilities post facto. So don't be confused into thinking that your free choices ever really cause what you intended. Your will causes things which your intentions could not possibly be rich enough to have faithfully modeled and proposed. It is only in cheapening and approximating your interpretations of results that your mind claims free and unique authorship. It's essential to notice that in this way free will is always perceived post-facto. It is felt in the choosing, but perceived as real through this mapping process, which is a way of interpreting the past. Nothing magic is happening ahead of events. Each experience proceeds in a stream flow in time. Some of those processes snip out some of the data for good encoding reasons. But don't forget those if you want to be clear about something like the nature of free will and human creation of reality.
Second, the freedom to choose can truly exist in the ontological domain of the mind. It is indeed real, a part of our universe. However, the freedom to choose does NOT exist outside of that subjective domain. That is, free will is not real in the empirical sense that you can demonstrate it to someone else. Free will is not an objective thing, but rather a subjective experience. Considering this, some then want to throw away all meaning from the phrase and then say that free will is an "illusion". This is NOT what I'm suggesting. I'm only saying that the ontological domain we call shared reality is not the same as the ontological domain of the subjective experience of a mind. I'm OK with saying that free will exists. I'd even assert emphatically that my free will is real to me, but I admit that I cannot demonstrate my free will to others. Like the oracle said in The Matrix, "Being the one is like being in love. No one can tell you you're in love. You just know it, balls to bones." That's how it is with all feelings and subjective experiences. They are unique to the subjective domain in which they arise. We can "relate" by doing some inter-subjective correlation, but we can't actually "identify" with another person's experience of feelings. So it is that we can suspect that others experience choices as we ourselves do, but we cannot validate either's. We are each left to validate our will through our own feedback interactions with reality as described above. Our proposed possibilities are ours alone, and our interpretations of the later experiences after our choices are enacted are also ours alone. No one else can share those in their completeness. Again, we can correlate, but we can't own for ourselves those that arise in others' experience. Each subject is a locus of experience that is indeed uniquely flowing through the present.
Now what about just how free and creative the choices actually are? So I contemplate two different futures based on two different possible action sets to which I believe I can engage my will. Consider the contemplation of a hunter, a simple binary choice presented to him as a small young deer walks into range of his bow. "1. Shoot the deer, or 2. Remain in wait?" Imagination sourced in experience presents these options as alternatives, along with as many more as we have the creativity to dream up. Experience will further mediate the decision. Desire drives the whole process. Uncertainty engages the conscious attention; we don't know which answer will work out better to satisfy our hunter's desire.
So the options are presented and the chooser, which is not well defined, nor can it be fully observed, feels that it is free to go with one path or another. It tilts based on hunches, feelings, moods, a sense of being rushed or not; it weighs how hungry it is, it weighs the odds of the successful strike of the arrow, and in doing this it assesses the state of itself, its body, its chemistry. And then it happens: a proto-choice is made. It's not clear that it's conscious. It's not clear that it's finally decided, but at some point the will engages, the motor system begins to respond to the hints it's receiving, the bow is raised, the adrenaline adds focus, the breath is held, the arrow is sighted to its target. And yet the decision process continues. If the deer moves, the deal is off. If another bigger deer comes into view, the deal is off. This hunter remains free, which really just means the decision is not yet made, and his sensitivity to input from all sources remains engaged and connected to the deciding process. The input channels remain open until...
Suddenly the arrow flies and the deed is done. The decision is made only when the decisive action is taken. Until then judgment may be reserved, and in fact is reserved. Looking back and taking the hunter's perspective, did I have a choice? Sure, I weighed the options, I was open to changes. Now that the deed is done, do I have a choice? No. We have now moved into a state where I have reset the problem in that the "decision" I contemplated, the action I had proposed, has now moved from speculation into reality. The imaginations I entertained have now been deeply altered by the events that have revealed themselves to me. My uncertainty about the future of those contemplated actions ceases entirely, and I am all about gathering data again. Did I hit the target? How mortal is the wound? What sounds were unleashed?
These new data flood into my awareness. Sometimes I act "without thinking", perhaps jumping out of my hiding spot to finish off the deer with my knife before it can struggle away. Sometimes I sit and wait seeing that the deer is dying quickly and silently as my chances of finding another have not been diminished!
On and on and on. It is in a way funny that we call this free will, because to me it seems just as conceivable as a completely constrained never ending process of continual sensitivity to an environment wired to abilities to move in response. It could just as well be labeled "openness" or "sensitivity". I think the only thing that surprises us about it and makes it feel magical is that 1) We identify with the choice as a matter of practical convention, and 2) we can trace actual results as being downstream from processes we experience internally, and yet 3) We can't observe the entirety of the process, neither its dataset, nor the whole of its decisive plunge to action. It is really really neat, but is it "free will"?
I think what everyone is really concerned about with free will has to do with answering this question:
"Can I effectively alter what's otherwise inevitable?"
But it's the question which is the problem. It is rife with misleading assumptions which must be addressed if we are to sincerely contemplate the question of free will.