Do you control what you believe?

[Edwardo Piet]

In the libertarian sense being discussed, essentially by definition, the self-control or conscious input one has on affecting ones own fears and desires can only be motivated by preexisting contravening desires.

As I have said, the libertarian sense of free will isn't even logically coherent. Either we are ultimately entirely predetermined by unconsciousness or we are ultimately entirely undetermined. Libertarian free will would require neither of those to be true or it would have to avoid falling into an infinite regress of there never being enough conscious motivation. It can't do either.

Only some forms of non-libertarian "free will" are possible.

[...]we are ultimately and entirely predetermined to be who we already happen to be.

Yes.

Who we are, from our own conscious point of view, is a thing to be discovered, not a thing to be decided. So self awareness requires knowledge of self.

The way I personally interpret it is that we still make decisions it's just our decisions are predetermined. We make decisions in the sense that we have conscious motivations that encourage us to make them.

To say that decision making didn't exist might make us wrongly equivocate determinism with fatalism. The idea of no decisions existing at all seems fatalistic to me. Fatalism is an irrational notion because it excludes our conscious motivation(s) from the causal chain of the universe, while determinism by itself doesn't do that.

[...] It may be that if one is motivated by a desire for this self knowledge that the scope of decision making available to the individual becomes much greater than "being entirely predetermined" would suggest.

If we are ultimately entirely predetermined then it can't become greater. If instead we're undetermined then our will can't determine anything. Either way we don't have libertarian free will. Our "scope" doesn't change either way, we simply make choices, and some people have more "self control" or self-encouragement/self-discouragement in other words than others. We make choices... but not free choices. Or, if we are to define all choices as "free" then we make decisions, but they are not free and we don't make "choices".

It may be that conscious awareness of contradictory desires, in other words gaining a perspective from which possessing them both makes some kind of sense, may actually enable the individual as a whole to reconcile those competing desires.

In what way could we reconcile contradictory/competing desires?

This would not be an exception to the rule that choices and motivations are not consciously manufactured.

Ultimately they entirely aren't, yes.

Here I am suggesting that the contribution of the conscious mind would be to provide a mirror to the deeper levels of the self from whence come all choices and motivation.

Which is still all ultimately entirely unconscious of course. Hence we are ultimately entirely predetermined.

There is no reason I can think of to suppose that the choices which motivate us are naturally well integrated. What do you think, does it fit?

Fit in what way? Our choices motivate us but out choices are ultimately entirely not free because they and ourselves are ultimately entirely predetermined by unconsciousness. In what way are you wondering whether choices "fit"? Everything fits in the sense that everything is predetermined by a causal chain.

I've read about this too. I've never been convinced that the activity detected is evidence that conscious activity is determined by unconscious activity. I assume that conscious activity and unconscious activity are connected. What is being measured here may merely show the marshaling of those unconscious underpinnings in support of the conscious activity.

What made you suspect that the evidence was wrong?