My argument (which I no longer believe) against free will This is a great post dude, but the problem i have with all of this is one really not so spoken problem nowadays, and it has to do with the way that Immanuel Kant treats this topic, if you haven't read the Critique of Pure Reason, or if you had, but you didn't try hard enough to understand everything that Kant put in there, and the system he created, i really recommend you to do it, that is a great thing to do, even if it takes a very long time. But to adress this topic more directly, the problem with the reductionism that you are talking about, is that is clearly this idea of explaining everything through hard science, which is kind of a strange way of functioning, the natural sciences (and some of psychology) are made in a way they build themselves through laws, and every discovery is normally made in the base of those laws. What i'm trying to say, is that in a rush of explaining really complex problems, we try to see them through the only really reliable discoveries that we had acomplished, the problem that Kant had with this, is one that it may had aged poorly, but is kind of difficult to refute, and it has to do with the distinction of Noumenon and Phenomenon, like you probably know, Noumenon is the things-in-itself, and Kant argues that we can't know them, wich is obviously true, we can only sense things in relation to our senses, our understanding, our reason, etc. So the problem is that most of the metaphysical problems, don't have any sense at all, both options make sense, but contradict each other, in the Antinomy, Kant talks about Free Will and Determinism in reference to this, clearly is difficult being deterministic, i mean, thinking that everything is cause and consecuence, has a problem if you try thinking about how is possible that the universe started, if everything occures in relation of the past, of causes, how is possible that a start exist? that would mean that something appear without a cause, that appear from nowhere, or was a consecuence of nothingness wich is the same thing, but thinking that free will is real is kind of strange for the reasons that probably everyone knows, so the solution is on the Trascendental Aesthetic, in which Kant says that Time and Space are not things-in-itselfs, they are part of our mind, our way to organize the world, and with this we kind of get that determinism is basically how we understand time working, (if all this talk about perception sounds extreme, you got to remember Piaget experiments, things that are obvious to us, like the difference between what i see and what you see, are not a reality to a child, that's why they think covering their eyes will make them invisible.) because time is basically things changing in relation to other things, and ourselves staying in the mid of this, Kant thought that the world of Phenomenon functions deterministically, but that doesn't mean that things-in-themselves do, maybe this is kind of strange, cause it would be confusing if we believe we are things-in-ourselves, but it sits a precedent to understand that this problem is almost impossible to solve if we are still discussing it under the same terms.
I know you mention the "esoteric sounding" but you are just throwing away an option just cause it doesn't go well with your epistemological ideas that are a product of the empiricist and causalist mode, that is not just obvious and irrefutable, is an stance that functions well if you want to explain the "natural world", but has really awful consecuences when you try to do it on everything.