If you try the experiment yourself—and you can do it right now, just by holding out your own arm, and deciding at some point to flex your wrist—you’ll become aware that it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision.
One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:
it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision
That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.
Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.
One book, Mind Hacks, iirc tangentially described that and experimented on a reader’s consciousness. The core idea was that a brain (mind) is not an instantly accessible state, but a continuous process of collecting all reactions into an observable picture, like stock exchange protocols (anyone who has programmed them will understand). E.g. everyone lives a little “in the past”, because what you see is what really was few moments ago, all the time. And it’s not just a neuron-neuron latency. Mind is an asynchronous process with many parts “getting in sync” retroactively, sometimes for a good reason, e.g. if audio and vision or tactility are out of sync, your mind allows up to 80ms of delay before raising that “obviously out-of-sync” flag. And in general, a large part of what you “perceive” is just a funny reconstruction. So, returning to:
it’s difficult to pinpoint the moment at which you make the decision
That’s because your “present” may lag or skip ahead for a large amount of “frames” and there is no common #clk for a reference. Also, mind may completely omit reporting the decision process to itself, cause there is no existential profit for doing that. As someone who suffers from panic attacks, I can tell you that it’s damn hard to isolate and revisit specific thoughts and feelings that may have provoked that condition few moments ago. I only learn that slowly because it’s a part of a therapy, and otherwise it is completely imperceptible.
Tl;dr: perception and mind-related expectations in these experiments may be too naive.