That makes a lot of sense to me. It would kinda imply that all our decisions are made by purely physical processes; that is, all our actions and movements are a result of electromagnetic interactions, just like computers, and we take no part on it. Instead, we're just "watching" it from the outside, in such a manner that it is extremely convincing that it is "us" who are making these decisions, but it isn't. In that interpretation, "outside" is another realm which we do not understand, and "us" is our real selves, which exist outside the physical universe. That would also imply some humans could possibly be watched by "0" beings, i.e., they're purely physical, like computers. At the same time, some humans could be watched by more than one being, even though they'd never suspect.

Salvia divinorum... confirmed

Makes sense to me. Fits with the framework from “I am a strange loop” which I like

Maybe consciousness is what it feels like to be the process of recalling near real time memories for calculating the next move

This theory along with the new physics experiment that proved the universe only exists locally as you measure it have really fucked me up

Relearning frontal lobe functionality. Funny how the brain works.

Seems only logic?

First we need to process all the inputs, I don’t see a problem with this.

Isn't this all extremely obvious? All of our senses are lagged behind real time and the data we receive must be processed and stored before we can act on it. If A then B.

If you examine neural networks of any kind (biological or artificial), you will find that the input layer of neurons are a type of neuron that behave similar to memory neurons anyway. All different kinds of neurons are related to this so even our sensory inputs could be considered memories as well. I do not think it is reasonable to assume that we can have inputs that are not filtered in this manner. The 'spark' happens internally where neurons communicate with each other.

This is a silly test for “free will” we already know that reactions are subconscious. If something is thrown at your face you move. You don’t think about moving and then move. You just do it. However I can think about typing out this response to you. I. Can. Stop. And. Make. Periods. For. No. Other. Reason. Than. Conscious. Control.

You can sit for hours and think logically about a problem and solve that problem using conscious thought. Where do those thoughts come from then? I can choose to sit in response to what I read about free will for ten minutes. Or I could choose to get up. I can tap my fingers or do any one of a million choices that have nothing to do with instinctual brain processing.

I am open to discussion. I just haven’t seen an explanation for conscious logical thought that answers the no free will question enough for my taste.

The best I have seen is, your brain is tricking you into having those thoughts. That everything that happens in your brain is like this article. A memory that pretends to be conscious. But that doesn’t track with living as a human being. I don’t know. It all seems to fall apart with just a small amount of “free will” taken when talking about free will. Even the choice to engage with this post was a choice. I will just stop typing because I chose to

Interestingly this buffer may not last half a second, but minutes, days, weeks, months, and years. This is: we perceive and act on world by using all of our past memory. Both are obvious things, but surprise is that they are very tightly connected. Catching a fly is not much different than deciding on very long term actions, decisions that require huge amount of past memory, instead of 1 second of it

I think their answer would be that your conscious mind is not making the decision to act. Some other, unconscious part of your mind is making that decision instead, and since the conscious mind's job is to invent the narrative of a unified self, it pretends that it made the decision.

I think this just moves the problem back a level though. We know for sure there is pre-conscious processing of senses, and this seems like a debate about how much pre-conscious processing there is, rather than an explanation of consciousness. As an explanation, it fails for the same reason all consciousness-is-illusion explanations fail, which is that it requires something that experiences the illusion, which is itself a conscious experience.

I think it's a long loop. Unconscious decisionmaking, but conscious reflection generates a training signal that eventually feeds back into the unconscious.

I heard somewhere that consciousness can hold or veto decisions as well.

It says that perception is not conscious. So what we experience as our conscious perception is accessing the most recent memories, which could reasonably be used to actively choose a course of action.

That would make sense with theories of mastery, where early stages of doing a new task (walking, riding a bike) require our full focus, evolving to an ability to do the task under normal circumstances, then to negotiate common obstacles, then to deal with novel obstacles as they occur. The conscious effort discovers and develops solutions that our unconscious can use in the future, so when you get bumped while walking, your unconscious corrects, while your conscious mind continues to work on other things.

Personally, it's a mix of being honest with oneself and unfortunately, self determination. Rebels unite!

“Row, row, row your boat Gently down the stream Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily Life is but a dream…”

dream, memory, simulation and reality all mean the same thing when it comes to AI building creations. The brain is nothing but a computer, every species has a brain of some sort even it’s smaller relative to our brains. You can go as small as an ant or even to plants cause they still have membranes. I think that brain scaling lineage never ends, it just keeps going smaller and smaller relative to our perceived size. Right now there are wars going on inside your body with viral membranes. Then we go to atoms and we literally feel the electromagnetic force of our electrons pushing away their electrons from literally anything in physics. I tend to believe in subatomic universe theory and that every atom has conscious “stored” in it with information and contains “universes” or to make it simple “parallel dimensions” full of life energy, frequencies and vibrations that are connected to every fabric that can be perceived by a computer given it has instruments to observe with.

Rick and Morty episode where Rick takes morty inside his car battery to reboot it via simulating their minds inside the car battery to interact with the consciousness inside the computer. They met another greenish alien humanoid named Zeep who was as smart as Rick and was able to make a car battery similar to Ricks to where it was power by yet another mini verse. Both Rick and Zeep then interact with Zeeps car battery and get stuck inside another world where an very intelligent alien ghost looking humanoid Kyle who later commits suicide from the realization that the “god” who created him was also created by another being who was also created from another being. That would be super intimidating ngl.

https://rickandmorty.fandom.com/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy

An interesting note to add to your sleep comment - we actually can experience the feeling of falling asleep. It’s a somewhat challenging exercise, but I’d give WBTB a google if you’re curious as to what I’m talking about. And no, this isn’t pseudoscience lol.

Have you read anything about CTMU? Langans work is interesting in the realms of ontology, and phenomenology. The epistemological rupture is ongoing.

Not if we look at death as the end of memory. But the question then becomes, how long does memory last?

This. They're saying "thinks aren't perfectly instant!"

Right... But wasn't that fairly obvious already?

We consciously exist in an interpretation of past events.

Always has been

The universe is hard deterministic, free will isn't even a discussion.

If cause and effect are as linear as they appear, maybe. Possibly your future self has more influence on present you than you can perceive.

Or you could think of it like strategies versus tactics: you make a narrative to construct consciousness out of your memories, and while decisions in the moment are happening before you know, you can affect the mid-and-long range decisions before they occur.

I think it would mean that changing a “default” response requires deliberate effort to generate the neural pathways that let you behave otherwise. There’s an illusion of choice in your consciousness, but the energy required to make deliberate choices is wasteful, so if you turn left at some corner 100 times, you won’t need to exert much energy to decide to turn left, even though you could turn right every time and probably needed to use your deliberative consciousness to specifically choose to turn left the first time.

1. In the article, the author says, “We don’t perceive the world, make decisions, or perform actions directly. Instead, we do all these things unconsciously and then—about half a second later—consciously remember doing them." I can't tell why they expect it to be about half a second though.
2. Separate from this theory, we already know our pre-conscious processing fills in false details. That's why you don't see the blind spots caused by your optic nerves, and why you do see optical illusions.