Deliberation is never free of necessitation.
That's my point. Deliberation necessarily happens, and all of the thoughts and feelings we have during deliberation necessarily happen as well. Causal necessity insures that choosing will happen and that we will be doing that choosing.
It cannot be a matter of free will because it is the state and condition of the system that determines what happens in each and every moment in time as the system evolves without deviation.
The only part of the system that actually determines what we will order for dinner is us. The rest of the system is busy doing other things. Deciding what we will order is happening locally, within our own brains. It is not happening globally.
Not because I happen to say it, just how determinism works.
Determinism works because all of the causal mechanisms, whether physical, biological, or rational, are presumed to be reliable within their own domain, and we can thus presume that every event is the reliable product of some specific combination of physical, biological, and/or rational causation.
Choosing what we will have for dinner involves us being physically there in the restaurant, with a physical menu in our hands. It also involves our biological need for food and the hunger we experience that reminds us it is time to eat. It also involves our personal dietary goals (like eating more fruits and veggies) and the recall of what we had for breakfast and lunch (an overdose of protein and fat), so we rationally choose the Salad instead of the juicy Steak.
Our will to order the Salad when we could have had the Steak was the inevitable result of physical, biological, and rational causation. Each playing its part in necessitating the choice.
As has been repeatedly pointed out, whether free will is real or not depends entirely upon the definition we choose for "free will".
If "free will" is simply us deciding for ourselves what we will order for dinner, free of coercion and undue influence, then obviously free will is quite real and a meaningful concept. (It's how the waiter knows who is responsible for the bill for our dinner).
But if "free will" requires freedom from physical, biological, and rational causation, then no such thing exists.
'Ordinary people' don't have access to the necessary information of the system as it evolves. Our limited experience gives the impression that we could have freely chosen from a number of options as they are presented to us......yet, when considered in relation to how determinism works, that impression is clearly is an illusion and there was never the possibility of thinking or doing whatever must necessarily be thought and done: inner necessity.
Actually, it is through our own experience that the human race evolved the logic and language of possibilities, specifically to deal with our lack of knowledge as to what will necessarily happen and what we will necessarily choose.
It's a simple logic. When we don't know for sure what "will" happen, we consider instead the things that we know for sure "can" happen. We change the "will" to "can", to keep the actualities separate from the possibilities, and to remind us that we are speaking of things that only exist within our imagination.
I don't know yet what I "will" order for dinner, but I know that I "can" order the Steak and I "can" order the Salad. I then estimate the likely outcomes of having the Steak versus the outcomes of having the Salad. Based on that evaluation, I decide that I "will" order the Salad, even though I "could have" ordered the Steak.
Both "I will order the Salad" and "I could have ordered the Steak" are true statements. And it will always be the case, whenever a choosing operation occurs in the causal chain, that there will be the single inevitable thing that I "would" do, and at least one other thing that I "could have" done.
As you point out, we do not have the necessary information to know in advance what we will do. Thus, we must, by logical necessity employ the logic and language of possibilities to productively deal with such matters of uncertainty.
It is not a matter of being ignorant of deterministic causation. We can certainly know in advance that, in principle, all events are reliably caused by prior events, such that every event will be causally necessary from any prior point in time. We just don't know in advance what specifically we will choose, until we've actually chosen it ourselves. For all practical purposes, it is our own thoughts and feelings that are causally determining that choice.
There is no other "system" that makes that choice for us. The only system making the actual choice is our own central nervous system. It is really and truly us, by our own brain, that is causally determining our choice. The suggestion that it is something else is a delusion, a self-induced hoax.
