Libet’s methodology focused on self-reported decisions, but in a way that sees them as an instantaneous event. I’m sure you can agree that instantaneous decisions are a rarity for we humans.
Instead, we embark on a decision much as we do a visit to the dentist — slowly. Some people can’t make decisions st all. So to treat decisions as an instantaneous event does not correspond with reality at all, but rather a general decent into the mass delusion that the mind is a machine, the wheels and sprockets of which are somehow coded in “programming” that directs its operations, spitting out results. I liked the older steam-punk version better than today’s equally absurd idea relying on “software.”
In the case of decision-making actually being the process we all feel it to be, the readiness potential in Libet’s experimental setup is rising in conjunction with the turning of attention towards making a decision, with the decision coming after that, but before time W, which is not the moment in the decision process when the decision is made, but rather, is another turning of the attention to the need to report the fait accompli to the investigators (this being an experimental setup). At the same time — because we have the ability to walk and chew gum at the same time — the motions of our body which aim at pushing the experimental button takes place, completing at time M.
Yet, even the body’s motions are seen today as mechanical, much in the vein of Kempelen’s original Mechanical Turk, and so our redundant “awareness-consciousness” serves as the midget hidden under the Turk’s cabinet (and our “sub-conciousness” inside that midget).
But that double abstraction, “awareness-consciousness,” rather than pointing to something actual, is just a phantasm of the same descent into the delusion that everything about us is mechanical, and thus the rather obvious non-mechanical bits must be abstracted out of the whole in order to make it so.
A more insightful take would see thoughts as being known as they arise, because “knowing” is the act of instantiating something, not recording it’s separate existence already arisen from a kind of uncaused virgin-birth — that being yet another delusion that is widely held today — thoughts thinking themselves…
What is thought of abstractly as “awareness,” or “consciousness,” or their hybrid pairing, is just the cognitive activity of a responsive naturing coherently instantiating all the things we think already exist, according to the exigencies and conditions of the moment. And that includes delusional ideas that seem to us to make sense because we have already agreed to the delusional thinking that begets them.
Perhaps the joke is still on us, Mitchell, in the form of our modern mechanical illusions arising from an abstracted reality built on delusion.
