The problem is how we view time. As these mobile organisms, necessitating a sequential process of perception, in order to navigate and having built an essentially narrative based culture, we experience time as the point of the present moving past to future. Which physics codifies as measures of duration.

The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as events form and dissolve.

There can be literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

So the process of determination, of calculating the input, creating the output, can only occur as the present. So the future remains potential, while the past is residual and often open to interpretation.

Though free will is an oxymoron, as 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.

It is fairly evident that we don't directly control our immediate motor responses and that our conscious state is a bit of an illusion, as the mind can create similar experiences when we are sleeping and we do spend a great deal of our waking time imagining alternate and potential possibilities, as well as reviewing past events, so it would seem the function of the conscious state is to imagine, so that future motor responses are better informed.

A thought to consider though, is the primary difference of being awake, versus sleeping and dreaming, is the mental process has to constantly reset to new information, so we do function within the parameters of this larger reality. Yet the more we can influence and push back against that larger reality, the more we can create a bubble of our own chosing, living in what will increasingly resemble a dream state. Until the feedback goes from positive to negative and the bubble crumbles, leaving us unprepared to deal with an external reality and the consequent negative feedback we've created.

Live and learn.