> Are “you” wanting the thing or is your brain just firing conflicting signals automatically and you experience that as a thought after the fact?
You're implying a definition of "you" here that I don't use. My definition of myself is like the collection of signals that can be attributed to myself. Which is important since my brain contains multiple people who can each have their own independent signals.
(Of course, there are multiple definitions of myself depending on which realm I'm using it in, but in terms of the physical realm, yeah it's whatever my brain does that can be attributed to "me" somehow. So it's self-describing, technically. Or I am. Literally.)
In other words, my self is not a physical point in the brain from which decisions originate. My concept of self is meant to make it easier for me to communicate where it feels like a thought or action of mine ("of mine", see?) originated.
You can see something like this in split brain experiments, where one side of the brain can do something visible to, but completely independent of, the other side, which is neurologically disconnected. That other side will then interpret this as having been an action of its self, even without ever actually having done it.
That suggests the self exists only as something to which actions and feelings can be attributed. A thought device, maybe.
Part of the reason why it's important for me to recognize this is because my brain does contain multiple selves, also known as dissociative identities. I need to have some way of identifying myself in here that's more nuanced than "if my brain consciously did it, then obviously it was me".
During polyconscious periods I have a stable identity even while others coexist, but I'm not always polyconscious, so sometimes my identity will change and I have to figure out who I've changed into.
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I have experienced a difference between "arriving at something through conscious thought" and "my brain arriving at something without conscious thought", because the latter typically completely bypasses conscious thought. It can take years for me for me to consciously catch up to things that my brain had already figured out long ago, because it didn't use thoughts to do it.
An example is trauma responses. I have a few elaborate protection mechanisms that I did not understand for about six years because they relied on quite a few bits of knowledge that I simply did not have until recently. But the trauma was shocking enough to force my brain to make an immediate correction, and I was not consciously involved whatsoever in this. I was never given conscious thought or awareness but it managed to protect me so well that it took me years to figure out what it was even protecting me from. That's fascinating to me.
So there is compelling evidence that my brain has the capacity to make extremely elaborate calculations without my conscious involvement whatsoever. I guess your question still stands about whether or not my experience of consciousness is a direct result of these same processes or whether the experience of consciousness is different enough to have its own semblence of "free will".
This is ignoring the materialistic observation that the brain is technically deterministic, of course.
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> The linked article talks about direct measurement of brain activity. ie you can compare when something happens in the brain vs when you think you chose to make a particular decision.
This won't necessarily allow you to tell apart whether someone had the thought first or interpreted some non-thought signal as a thought retroactively. Both would feel exactly the same from the perspective of whatever form of consciousness had the corresponding experience of thought. It's even likely that both possibilities happen, considering you can be reminded of things by your senses, and, you know, get feedback from the world.
I sometimes figure out thoughts retroactively, but because I'm used to this I can typically tell it apart, or at least tell apart the fact that I retroactively re-identified something that had occurred before the identification. But this is over time scales of minutes, hours or longer, to the point where I would remember having considered that thought differently before. If it happened in some sort of direct chain reaction, it would be indistinguishable from the thought happening that way from the start.
There's a load of other nuance in it from my perspective but that should be the most relevant bit of it.
By the way, keep in mind I'm autistic so I don't know if neurotypical brains work in an even remotely similar manner.