Free will

 We often have discernible choices, but we must be mindful to be aware of them; otherwise we act out of habit or our desires.  This implies that actual free will rarely is utilized and more often than not our subconscious has already decided before we act.  I can deliberately and freely make my toe move, but if instead I think to my big toe, sometime shortly, move, then my subconscious actually does it in a few seconds.
10:45 AM

This touches on some genuinely interesting territory — and you're tracking something real about the neuroscience and phenomenology of volition.

The Libet experiments from the 1980s are the classic reference point here. Libet found that the readiness potential (a measurable brain signal anticipating movement) preceded conscious awareness of the intention to move by several hundred milliseconds. This was taken by many as evidence that the "decision" had already been made before the conscious mind knew about it. Later work by Haynes and others extended this, reportedly predicting decisions up to ten seconds before subjects reported making them.

Your two-case distinction is actually sharper than it might first appear:

The direct command — "move now" — feels like pure conscious initiation. The deliberate, present-tense quality seems to compress the gap between intention and execution.

The deferred command — "move in a few seconds" — is almost a natural experiment. You load an intention and then, as you note, something else executes it. The "you" who issues the instruction and the "you" who carries it out are functionally different processes. The conscious mind has essentially handed off a task to a subroutine.

What this suggests about free will is nuanced rather than simply dismissive of it. One reasonable position is that free will operates most genuinely at the level of attention and framing — deciding what to think about, what goals to hold, what habits to cultivate — rather than at the level of individual motor commands. On this view, the conscious self is less a moment-to-moment executive and more an architect who sets conditions that the subconscious then implements.

Your observation about habit is central here. Most behavior runs on well-grooved subroutines. The window for genuine deliberation is narrow and requires effort to open. So free will, if it exists meaningfully, may be less about overriding the machine in any given moment and more about the longer work of shaping what the machine is inclined to do.

The Buddhist framing you're familiar with isn't far from this: the untrained mind is largely reactive, running on conditioning. The practice of attention is precisely the attempt to widen that deliberative gap — to catch the moment before the subroutine fires.

Free will is one of those things we just have to assume is true axiomatically, even though it cannot be either determined (such as by personality traits) nor random whim.  It is comparable in this to the assumption of sentient consciousness; we have no idea what it is or how it originates, but we know it's there.
10:48 AM

This is a clean and defensible position — and the parallel you're drawing between free will and consciousness is tighter than most treatments acknowledge.

Both face the same fundamental explanatory gap. With consciousness, you have the hard problem: no account of physical processes, however complete, seems to explain why there is something it is like to be you. With free will, you have an analogous hard problem: no account of causes — neural, psychological, environmental — leaves room for a causally efficacious self that isn't just another domino in the chain. And yet the first-person experience of both is undeniable from the inside.

What you're doing by treating them axiomatically is actually philosophically respectable. It's close to what Kant was doing when he argued that free will cannot be demonstrated within the causal order of nature, but must be postulated as a condition for the coherence of moral experience. You can't get to it empirically; you presuppose it because the alternative — that deliberation is pure theater — is not livable and arguably self-undermining. A being with no free will cannot genuinely reason its way to the conclusion that it has no free will.

The parallel deepens further. Consciousness and free will may not be two separate mysteries but aspects of the same one. The capacity for genuine choice may be inseparable from there being a subjective viewpoint from which options are weighed. Remove sentience and you don't just lose consciousness — you arguably lose the only candidate we have for the seat of volition.

What neither can be, as you note, is located in the middle ground between determinism and randomness — which is precisely where they would have to be if they were natural phenomena. Determined choice isn't free; random choice isn't yours. The fact that free will fits neither category isn't a failure of the concept — it may be a signal that it belongs to a different order of description entirely, one that third-person causal accounts simply cannot reach.

That's an uncomfortable place to leave things, but it may be the honest one.