A basic flaw with how we model reality is that as these mobile organisms, necessitating this sequential process of perception and having evolved a narrative based culture, we experience time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Since we experience causality as this sequence, the presumption becomes that all subsequent events follow from an initial cause.

The reality though, is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Cause becomes effect.

Time is frequency, events are amplitude.

As for causality and sequence, yesterday doesn't cause today, the sun shining on a spinning planet creates this cycle of days and nights. Energy transformation is causality.

So the process of determination can only occur as the present.

Energy goes to the future, while events go to the past. As consciousness goes to the future, while thoughts go to the past, suggesting consciousness functions as energy, which is causal.

Yet the mistake of free will, is that a will free of cause would be equally free of effect and the premise of will is to affect. We are a small part of nature's process of selection.

The function of consciousness isn't to make immediate decisions, as that is a motor response. The connections between our eyes and feet are quicker without all the interference. Flies have much faster motor responses, because they don't have all that wiring.

Consciousness, all those images, imaginations, little voices in the back of the head, ear worms, etc, are to process information, so that future responses are better informed.