Oh, the decision makers are, AFAICT, in our brains, so it's hard to separate the decision maker from myself.Giorgio wrote:This does not mean that the decision has been taken by someone/something else seven seconds before, but simply that seven seconds before I fed the request to my subconscious part and I got a solution that I stored and will I use seven seconds later.
Six* or seven seconds is a seeming eternity in our thought processes and an equal delay (from your "stored and..use seven seconds later") in the real world is enough to cause a disaster. Further, the experimental subjects know long in advance what the task will be: choose left or right. Not a hard task, I think, but why are brains so predictable so far in advance of the action of pressing one button or another**?
I confess I am not well equipped educationally to knowledgeably to debate these matters. However, whenever I think how smart I am, I think about this experiment and further reinforce my humility about how little I know, even about my intimate self.
*The Oxford professor probably has a faster brain than average!
**I'm estimating it takes about 1/4 second for the impulses to get to the finger muscles based on what I remember about braking reaction timing studies for automobile drivers. Not a perfect analog, but close enough here.