| HN Mirror

There are other interpretations of some of these experiments (e.g. regarding the action potential). In his book on free will, Mark Balaguer elaborates a little bit. I don't remember the details well, but I'll try to sketch what I think he says.

First, in my recollection, Balaguer points out the form of the argument as follows.

Given that: (1) a particular study shows that one's (perception of when they decided to act) _lags_ the (experimental measurement of the person's action potential spiking), what can we validly conclude?

Some people then claim that (2) claims of making a decision are merely post-hoc rationalizations. I get the sense that such a view is widely held among those who have heard of the experiments -- or at least the popular characterizations of them.

Balaguer says e.g. "not so fast". He points out that we need to talk about the logically necessary steps to reason from (1) to (2). He has a section on this; he claims it isn't as watertight as some think.

As I recall, part of the discussion has to do with motor planning.

Another part is this: there could be a volitional choice that precedes and causes both the action potential spike _and_ the perception/recognition. That volitional choice is unavailable to conscious awareness until some time later, presumably. If true, a person could have made the choice, noticed it later, and still be consistent with the experimental findings.

Apologies for the hazy recollection. I recall not being strongly convinced, partly because I wasn't impressed by the book overall, but I also haven't dug into these topics as much as I would like.

Lucky for us, the issue of latency between action and perception is squarely in the wheelhouse of distributed systems engineers!