[alwaysbeconsing]

> even though your internal monologue might still be going "hmm should I pick A or B?", the decision, where your internal monologue eventually will end up, has already been made.

There is an older better experiment by Benjamin Libet of this. The participant is directed to choose whether to press a single button, and watching a fast clock display to report the instant the decision is taken. The measurement and comparison of the brain activity clearly shows deciding to press, many milliseconds before the participant experiences deciding. Therefore, the participant does not have free will, is it not so? Since the decision is done before it is known to be done by the subject.

The retort is simple. The leap to "no free will" ignores that consciousness itself is a processing: the brain component that reconciles the internal input and renders it for externality takes time to do its work. The decision is still made by the participant. The subjective experience is behind the objective activation simply just as the signal for a television screen must pass through the wire before it is translated for pixels.

[The5thElephant]

You have to define free will first, and that is essentially impossible. What is happening in that "processing" though? That is not free will, your will is being determined by the state and context your brain is in. In fact any thing that is not a purely random choice is not a free will, and a purely random choice is not a will at all. The very concept of free will as most people understand it is absurd.

The only definitions of free will that work are deterministic ones.

To elaborate on your TV signal analogy, the TV does not get to "choose" what it shows next no matter the technical reason for the awareness of the choice coming later or not. These are physical deterministic processes.

[pizza]

How about 'post-processing that increases the information of an output signal beyond the information of the input signal', i.e. something that violates the data processing inequality.

[LocalH]

The leap from "detectable signals before sensation of choice means no free will" is laughable to me, as it presumes instant signal propagation within the brain, and instant processing speed, neither of which can be presumed. Your brain has to "make the decision" to do something before you can ever sense that you did, and it takes time for signals to propagate and be processed by your brain. It's also known that the brain can to some degree "rewind" time and fill in the blanks with information that it had to infer after an action was taken, such as how the brain fills in microsaccades.