People looking at this from a revamped version of religious theories of free will (if it has to happen, or if God knows it will happen, is it free?) are going to confuse the forest for the trees here.

The fact that no accurate prediction can be made is pretty much the crux of it, and you’re correct in saying that my thought experiment doesn’t succeed in showing that free will exists. (In my defence, I wrote in my post that I had to “tentatively conclude” that I have free will. You’ve made that conclusion slightly more tentative.) However, all the myriad possibilities of predictions, predictions of predictions, reactions to predictions, etc., make the waters a lot murkier, and I think they’ll have to be waded through a lot more thoroughly before we can come to a conclusion either way.

But back to your original thought experiment, the point I am trying to make is that there won’t be any deterministic predictions being proven wrong by anyone’s freedom. Rather, no accurate prediction can be made – which on the face of it has nothing to do with freedom (unless you have a particular way you want to spell out what freedom means), but with the simple fact that the prediction itself is a causal factor that determines the person’s behavior.

And that the moment you identify with the body you become helplessly bound to all of its yes/no/maybe dichotomies and all of the universal patterns of relationship within which the body is entangled, including the karmicly determined/inherited patterns of the particular body-mind-psyche that you have chosen to identify with.
Which of course is going to disintegrate and die, and you know very well that this is so.

The world of klik-klak and its relentless pattern patterning. Klik-klak being completely indifferent to the well-being and survival of any and every biological form that arises within the pattern.

Part of the problem with using the word “deterministic” is that it is of course possible that determinism and free will are true at the same time. Like you, I also don’t like the idea of a free will (or anything else) that completely contravenes the laws of nature. It is perfectly reasonable, though, that there can be a law of nature that allows two or more possibilities of choice, neither of which can be predicted in principle (my very basic knowledge of quantum and chaos theories tells me this). But what I want to argue against (call it determinism, fatalism, or what you will) is the idea that free will is an illusion. Something, I think, must account for the pervasiveness of the illusion (if that’s what it is) of free will. I think it’s fair to discount any notion of a Cartesian deceiving demon.

By the by, I think that one possible solution to the dilemma might come from evolutionary psychology, specifically in its potential to explain why we feel we are making free choices. If this can be shown to be real, then the anti-free will position will be further corroded.