This feeling of freedom might be nothing but ignorance of our causes.

Objects to

Spinoza · Letter to Schuller · 1674

Every state of the world follows from the prior state according to laws: the hypothesis, which succeeds everywhere else, from stars to cells.
But my brain, which deliberates, is a fragment of that world; its states too therefore follow from prior causes.
The lived moment of "choice" is then merely a link in that chain: felt from within, but already under way before I decide it.

Therefore The feeling of choosing freely is therefore no proof of freedom.

Deepenings

Libet's experiments

From the 1980s, Libet records a cerebral "readiness potential" that precedes the awareness of having decided by several hundred milliseconds.
If the act is initiated before the conscious decision, the feeling of "choosing now" would come after the fact, as a commentary on what is already under way.

Spinoza's image of the stone

Spinoza imagines a thrown stone that, for the span of its flight, were given consciousness and thought. Feeling its motion but unaware of the hand that cast it, it would believe itself free to go where it goes.
Such would be our condition: we perceive our desires and our decisions, but not the causes that produced them, and we mistake that ignorance for freedom.

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