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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

The key thing is this "the researchers were able to predict which pattern participants would choose up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision"

So this goes into the question of "free will". Is your conscious mind making the decisions or is just trying to justify the decisions made by the unconscious mind.

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The researchers did not decode it with 100% accuracy, so one interpretation is that the unconscious mind says "Instinctively, this seems like the right decision," 11 seconds later the conscious mind says either "Oh, yes, I agree with that" or less frequently "Actually I'll do something else", and the researchers are only tracking intuition.

If I understand correctly, the part that says

> up to 11 seconds before they consciously made the decision

should be interpreted as

> up to 11 seconds before they pressed one of the buttons

I can't imagine how they measure the time when the conscious decision was made but they definitively measure when the button was pressed.

It doesn't tell us anything about free will other than the fact that the process of decision making happens prior to our conscious awareness, which we already knew.

Ye, it's is kinda obvious that the decision is made before you "know it". How would it otherwise work.

I suppose the problem for me is, there isn't really a decision for the conscious mind to work on, the question is trivial without a right or wrong answer, free will doesn't enter into it.

This was choosing horizontal or vertical stripes, there isn't a rational reason not to go with my gut, although I could if I wanted to demonstrate free will.

Is the assumption then that "you" means only the conscious part of your brain?

What happens 11 seconds before the conscious decision can be part of free will, I guess.

Nope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will

OP is correct actually, it could be part of the process by which we exert our free will.

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