Free Will? Perhaps It Is Still There

We've been hearing that we don't have any free will because the subconscious brain seems to respond well before the conscious brain issues a motor command like, "move finger."

I'd like to address this issue from the perspective of a systems analyst. First, we have three pertinent modules: conscious, subconscious, motor. The information conveyed back and forth between these modules consists of commands like delay, move, start. etc., and feedback information like completed, movement detected, etc.

The investigator informs the subject that he (his conscious mind) is to issue a command to the fingers to move after a period of time to be determined by the conscious mind. [The conscious mind cannot measure time objectively but via the subconscious, in the form of possibly the cerebellum, it can count periods of time.]

So, here's how I think it plays out. The conscious mind issues a series of "delay" commands to the subconscious mind and the latter dutifully obliges and informs the conscious mind that the requested delay has completed. Fine, so far.

The conscious mind now decides to move and simultaneously it informs the subconscious not to count up any more delay periods and to implement the finger move. [although we can voluntarily move our skeletal muscle, we do not do it alone. We must use the subconscious to connect to the motor neurons. Let us recall that the motor neurons were connected to the subconscious way before the cortex came along.]

Motor neuron autonomous activation by the subconscious is suppressed and relegated mostly to the conscious mind when the conscious mind is awake; otherwise, we may be engaging in some really odd behavior when awake [this exact scenario may take place only when the action is novel before it has been entrenched in the subconscious.]

Let's get to the nitty-gritty, the conscious mind issues the command to move but it has to go through the subconscious. It is at this point that the researchers picks up a signal to move coming from the subconscious but the conscious mind is not conscious of the movement starting to occur until much later. It thinks that it has commanded the fingers to move and the fingers have obeyed but it actually took place earlier as a result of the command by the conscious mind to the subconscious mind. The conscious mind may actually have to wait for feedback from the fingers in order to determine that it has exercised its "free will." And this adds to the delay in free will being recorded by the researchers.

To recap, I believe the discrepancy occurs in this manner because a) the conscious mind has to utilize the subconscious to access the motor neurons b) the delay in implementing the conscious mind's free will is picked up by researchers as an artifact of the process/protocol of conscious motor control.