I’ve been thinking about a parallel between the classic Libet experiment and how decisions seem to form in layered ML systems.
Libet found that the brain’s readiness potential starts ~550ms before movement, but the feeling of deciding only shows up ~200ms before. So the neural “commitment” appears ~350ms before conscious awareness. This has often been taken as evidence that free will is an illusion — the brain decides before “you” do.
What’s interesting is that you see a structurally similar pattern in hierarchical models:
Lower-level processes effectively “commit” to a direction/state. That commitment only becomes visible later in higher-level representations (i.e. what you can actually observe or interpret)
So in both cases: the system's "output layer" — conscious awareness in Libet, spectral visibility in AI — is downstream of the actual commitment point. What feels like intention forming is actually intention being read, not written. The write happened earlier, in a layer that doesn't have direct phenomenal access.
That raises a broader question:
Is this a general property of complex hierarchical systems — that the layer reporting a decision isn’t the layer that made it? This collapses the distinction between "deterministic machine" and "free agent" — not because machines have free will, but because the biological substrate that generates the feeling of free will is doing the same thing machines do.
[link] [comments]