Regarding Libet’s experiment: Did he take into account the time it takes for the subject to push the button after he forms the intent to move his arm? A nerve signal has to travel from the brain to the muscle and the muscle must contract. This is not instantaneous.

It would take as long to push the button as to move the arm – it is a similar path. Of course the brain change would precede this, because the message has yet to travel to the two muscles involved.

There is no way to time directly the formation of intention. I would assume that it would be simultaneous for moving the arm and pushing the button, preceding both. Do I misunderstand the experiment?

Perhaps the mind-brain relation is like a well-run office, with the boss often absent, but the staff have instructions to get in touch with him by cell-phone (how appropriate!) when a novel situation arises. Most of the time, the highly competent staff run the office without requiring the boss’ attention. But they always tell him what they have done and are doing when he asks.

(An alternative metaphor is a system consisting of the car and its driver. But this will not be developed here.)

The boss can forbid certain actions which the staff might spontaneously want to take, such as taking an afternoon off for a picnic (equivalent to the unconscious deciding to take our clothes off in public when it’s too hot, or even more daring antisocial acts due to instinctive desires). The staff becomes conditioned, by education, to ask permission for such actions, or even not to suggest them at all.

The boss will not permit these actions, because he is aware of what his colleagues in other businesses would think, and does not authorize actions that would elicit their strong disapproval, because he has to interact with them for business deals. This is the essence of social pressure; and it is where env.ironmental influences can change the somewhat plastic nature of innate mechanisms in the brain.

The boss also has capacities not available to the staff, such as going to certain exclusive clubs,concerned with intellectual, scientific, artistic, and spiritual matters.

Both Dennet and Gazzaniga warn ,against seeking a seat of unified consciousness in the brain, the “cartesian theatre” or “the pearl of the mind”, or the “homunculus”. (“The boss” in the office analogy.) However, Dennet in the end describes the linear von Neuman computer to which the “demons” (separate brain devices) competitively seek access; and Gazzaniga deduces the presence of the “integrator” in the left brain that gives us the “illusion” of the unity of the self.

But why must it be an illusion? It could equally well be the emergence of a new entity – the very mind which the reductionists try to deny. It was the first fact which Descartes, in his radical doubt and deliberate agnosticism, first acknowledged as the primary fact. After all, it is the mind of the scientists that studies the neuro-physioloqy of the brain. As in quantum theory I the observer is a part of the system, and cannot eliminate itself by what it deduces from its own observations.