mico mico:
All they are showing is that decisions are made before any remodeling of them. There is nothing surprising about that. In fact, isn't that our experience?
Exactly! Science is great at exploring and revising its pictures within certain limits. But those limits, in this case materialism, are often philosophical, metaphysical, paradigmatical-- NOT scientific, not empirical-- and are apparently invisible to many scientists who are otherwise open minded inquirers.
This is all a lot more clear (to me) when taking a sociological and historical lens to scientific culture itself, which reveals a definite process which over time gave rise to these basic assumptions which form the unquestioned background to much scientific inquiry, and which produces the kinds of absurd interpretations of data like in the famous study from the top of the thread.
When I read this study without that materialist lens it sounds like just another re-statement of my intuitive sense that indeed choice/intention and rationalization are two different processes. However, this is not a fixed relationship, and as self-knowledge (or, as bare awareness of mind's processing of sensations) increases, rationalizations decrease, and intentions arise more simply and directly and in greater clarity. I bet many here can relate to this! And isn't this indeed correlated to an increased sense of freedom, freedom as spontaneity? In other words, there seems good phenomenological data to equate the
experience
of freedom with the spontaneous arising of intentions/actions rather than with conscious/deliberative processing, which often (to me) has more of the flavor of arrogance and/or confusion (especially in contrast with spontaneity). An interesting place to take the discussion would be towards the differences between impulsivity, spontaneity and deliberation.