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>>14688
I'd say the free will argument is mostly predicated on the idea that some aspect of reality is "goal-oriented," or teleological. Which means that if something has a goal as a property of what it means to exist, then that necessarily entails an "exclusion" of other goals in the way that it actualizes it's own potential.
So, let's say my goal today is to drive to the liquor store and buy some Maker's Mark for my underage girlfriend. For me to have that goal, I have to reject the other places (even in a general sense) that are NOT the liquor store, and reject all other things that are NOT Maker's Mark. This means that, at the moment I make the choice, I am considering an array of options, and have made a choice to take one, to the exclusion of all the others that I have knowledge of.
The alternative to this is to take a materialist position (a very common one among post-Enlightenment philosophers), which is that all proximate and remote causes are random and non-conscious, which means that all the effects of those causes are random and non-conscious. The problem here, of course, is the mind, being goal-oriented, seems to be the exception to that rule, which means that reality is at least partly goal-oriented, if only because the mind is literally in reality. That seems to lead to some kind of dualism, which has it's own problems. Some philosophers have endorsed "panpsychism" as a way out, while others have simply doubled-down on materialism.
Noam Chomsky famously wrote that no one can define these terms meaningfully enough to even form a question relevant to the problem, so it essentially doesn't matter. Philosophers like Ed Feser and some others disagree, and so do I.
I personally endorse the freedom of the will, but only because I believe the intellect is partly immaterial, which is also the position endorsed by Ed Feser and James Ross.