I'm not convinced by either the part with the apples or the temporal asymmetry.

I thought the point of asking if you could have done otherwise is to highlight that you cannot choose that which does not occur to you. Or that if a door was closed, you could not have gone through it on will alone.

And the apples seems like you're setting up an analogy and writing those against free will as making a mistake.

The apple reflects specific wavelengths into our eye, a cascade of neurons is triggered. We experience red. Just like we experience agency and a kind of "free will" in how we feel about ourselves.

Claiming free will is real, rather than something we experience, is what introduces the scale shift.