free will

What you have suggested in the begginnig of your post
is what I described in another thread as 'constrained will'.We are free to choose any alternative in a situation, but the
number of alternatives that will present themselves are limited
by our experience to date. Of those alternatives, our ultimate
choice is further constrained by factors in our psychological
makeup imprinted by our experiences to-date.In the context of the normal 'free will' debate, it is unknowable
whether or not we are truly free to choose. After the event
it is not possible to determine whether we could have made a different
choice.In the direction that this thread is taking, it seems to me, that
there are pyschological constraints both on 'what choices' an
individual will come up with, and once choices present themselves,
which ones will be ruled out as unacceptable.

I doubt that any of our behaviour could genuinely be
described as random.My feeling is that the interactions are simply so
complex as to appear random.That's not to say that we are mechanistic, necessarily,
but there is a process behind our behaviours ... an
exceedingly complex process, but process non-the-less.