I don't think this is a very productive direction because it seems like unfalsifiable speculation. Placing the hidden determinism enough "wants" away seems to m

I don't think this is a very productive direction because it seems like unfalsifiable speculation. Placing the hidden determinism enough "wants" away seems to make it obscure enough that you can think "sure, that's where the magic happens" and it's impossible to be proven wrong. IMO, the perception of free will comes from our observation of our deliberations and our actions. We observe that we often have choices and uncertainty about what to do, but something always breaks the impasse, because we always continue making choices and going on living. That "something" is what we call free will, and isn't entirely transparent to us. If you tried to crack open the black box, I think you'd see wants and want-to-wants driving things in there, but I don't think you'd see a clean system of n-th removed want-to-wants determining everything.