I was wondering about the time lag between when the subject saw the same monitor imagery as the clinician and when the subject became conscious of what its implications were.
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As the experiment may indicate that some people are more conscious than others, the feelings could be wide ranging 
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And feelings are so reliable. 
Could you briefly tell us about the conclusions from this experiment and how these conclusions affect free will? I just donāt have much time to read the whole article. Thanks!
This article gives a good summary of the study I referred to
Have you ever considered that for any action a person causes there is a causal chain of observable events? Fingers snap, muscles contract, nerves carry a signal from the brain, chemicals in the brain reactā¦ at issue is whether a person can really ever consciously determine an action
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That sounds suspicious to me ā if Iām playing ārock, paper, scissorsā and a third person is saying when to āgoā, I certainly donāt sit there eleven seconds before deciding and moving. An interval that long would mean that my mind is making a decision before the impetus to trigger that decision even happens.
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Yes we have free will, but maybe not as free as we like to think.
Take political opinions as an example. If you are asked a question related to politics, you are free to respond. BUT how you will respond depends on your prior knowledge and experiences with politics. There is a strong possibility that the answer you give in already ābaked inā to that prior experience. You might still answer differently of course, depending on the question, but it unlikely that a person can answer independently from their prior beliefs and their past decisions.
This also happens in sports. A skilled athlete doesnāt carefully consider each action; they mostly do what they have trained to do in that situation. There is still higher level thought happening, but itās probably focused a few steps ahead of the current action and what to do next.
Disclaimer: I might be a Bayesian. 
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Itās how lifeguards are trained. A couple of rescues I did were just doing without thinking ā Iād already done the thinking in lifeguard classes. Afterwards I got asked why I decided to do what Iād done, and being honest I had to say I didnāt decide, the deciding had already been done in training. Thatās especially true of contact rescues where a rescue depends on making physical contact with the person in trouble; that has to be muscle memory because there just isnāt time to stop and think.
True. As a lifeguard I remember hitting the water right from the lifeguard stand without having really decided what I was going to do; I didnāt start thinking about it until I was in the water and swimming to the person in trouble. Even deciding how to approach the person wasnāt a matter of thinking, it was reacting according to training. The one time I really stopped to think was when reacting according to training hadnāt worked ā and even then Iād reacted in accord with training in how to respond when things donāt go right (that brings up a humorous memory: if something doesnāt go right, training says back off and assess; a fellow lifeguard went into a pool to rescue a guy twice his size and the trained response hadnāt worked so he backed off, which meant swimming away from the guy while facing him. the guy lunged for the lifeguard, who backed off some more; after several seconds of backing away while the guy kept lunging, he realized that the guy was following him, so he shifted to head for the shallow end. it ended up with the guy in trouble in effect rescuing himself because he reached a point where a foot hit the bottom and he recognized he could stand).
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Free will is an impression that we have made a choice.
Finding that the choice arises from a deeper state of consciousness than we perceive, call it āthe unconscious self,ā has nothing to do with whether or not the will that made the choice is inherent in our own being.
Rather, here is an example that can shed light on making conscious choices. Iām told that this is āreal data.ā
John, male, middle aged, suffered the death of a tiny area within the brain which functions as a connector between emotional signals and the rest of the brain. This isnāt a precise statement, but the area was small and it was critical in processing emotion. In essence Johnās emotional states had gone away.
One day John was asked to buy cookies since there were none in the house. He was able to choose one grocery store, because it was closest. He was able to find the cookie aisle because it was marked. But he failed to choose from the wide array of cookies because none of them āresonatedā with him; nothing about any variety moved it ahead of any other variety. He could not choose.
Three hours later someone found him at the store in the cookie aisle and asked how far along he was in buying a bag of cookies.
Bottom line, choices are inevitably tied to a sense of value, and for many of us āvalueā is wedded to the emotions. This helps understand cognitive dissonance, where people on opposite sides of some important question realize that the other person simply fails to understand the importance of this or that factor, while failing to grasp the inner emotional tie-ins that are in process for one but absent for the other party.
How many times have you heard someone arguing a political point confess this without realizing it, when they ask whether YOU WANT some outcome that their emotional processing predicts, using your terms and their emotional coloring of those terms?
We are not robots.
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I have experienced that in regards to yard work, as a symptom of some sort of disorder. More than once Iāve stood at least an hour unable to decide what needed to be done next; twice friends have found me standing staring at something and had to take a tool from my hand and walk me back into my apartment.
It is interesting how well I make some design and engineering decisions and how frustratingly impossible some trivial ones are. I also donāt procrastinate ā I engage in what the airlines practice: Delay Management.
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I sense a kinship with Socrates, who reportedly was found standing in one spot, unmoved from where he had been seen the previous day - - thinking.
It wasnāt easy for me to learn that not overextending myself is not the same as procrastination. I ended up in the campus clinic before the end of my first quarter in college because I hadnāt learned I have limits . . . and that still didnāt get the point across.
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Thatās a totally different phenomenon! Iāve experienced both.
Iām not sure I have seen the āfree willā advocate argue that all of a personās actions are fully determined through conscious intention. That would be quite a claim. I went through Susan Blackmoreās Consciousness: A Very Short Introduction and can appreciate the odd things the unconscious mind is capable of. Some of those things I have experienced first hand.
The thing though, is whether a person is ever capable of consciously determining an action. Itās really quite that simple. And itās quite a claim to maintain that a person is not ever able to consciously determine an action.
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I knew you were going to say that!
But more seriously, that was not meant to be my claim.
If some maniac statistician followed me around documenting my every decision, they would eventually have enough data to make pretty good predictions about my future decisions. Not all my decisions to be sure, but they could do better than āflipping a coinā (unless I am also flipping a coin to make my decisions! 
)
In statistical terms, my future decisions are not independent of my past decisions. If I had the data to actually measure a correlation for this, a perfect correlation would indicate I was exerting no free will at all. In practice it would not be a perfect correlation, either because Iām applying free will or acting randomly.
For any given future decision, it will be determined by some combination of free will and past experiences. Itās unlikely that any decision is a product of 100% free will.
This is what I mean by ā¦
Yes we have free will, but maybe not as free as we like to think.
Your view fits well with my own which sees people as being contingent in being and necessary with respect to acting. That our decisions are largely determined by our environment and nurture (or lack of) is a component of what it means to be contingent in being.
And yet, an individual can still consciously act and make decisions, like choosing a simple series of numbers. Some determinists, like Susan Blackmore, suppose this is not actually happening, that consciousness is an illusion. Which makes me wonder what she is actually thinking 
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Thatās always been the problem with deterministic thinking: it removes the correspondence between thought and reality.
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