I completely agree. Well stated.

Surely you don't presume to shackle all humans to this given that you can't possibly know what others knows (and don't know), along these lines.

Of course not - I'd never presume to tell anybody they can't believe something like this! Even if people adopted beliefs I thought were particularly stupid (trolls live inside the Earth) I'd not want to "shackle" them from their beliefs. But I certainly don't want such beliefs being passed off as science.

I understand one who "doesn't know" generalizing this to everyone else because one cannot image others knowing what one doesn't know along these lines, but how is it any different than a person saying, "I cannot see blue therefore nobody else does either, and all reports of this mysterious blue are false" ?

Of course, we all can agree that subjective knowledge is of little or no use to another person who doesn't share it, unless that person is a person of trust. Even then it's iffy.

Epistemology is unsolved; we have no solid foundation for knowing what we know. So what can we do? Science is the best solution to the problems that we've managed to come up with so far.

Human beings are sufficiently similar to each other that if we cooperate in good faith, we can reach an amazing level of consensus with each other. All over the world, the vast majority of scientists - of all different religions and cultures and personal convictions - agree on a mountain of scientific evidence and conclusions about all sorts of things (including the basic tenets of evolutionary biology). The only reason such a high level of agreement could ever be reached is because science demands that we consider only evidence that is part of our shared experience. That is what's considered "objective"; if the vast majority of people can't agree on observations, then it's called "subjective" and it's kept outside of science.

Is this a formal, truly objective system? Of course not. Is "vast majority" a fixed percentage that triggers the conclusion of "objective" Of course not. Science is a human endeavor, not a formal system. But once we learned to eliminate subjective opinions from equal footing with confirmed shared experiences, we began to generate more knowledge than ever before in human history. I'd like to keep it that way! There's plenty of room in philosophy for reasoned arguments about issues that can't (presently) be resolved by appeal to shared experience.

aiguy: This is the essence of what I argue about ID. We don't know if the cause of life was conscious, and we can't know it. And yes, we can't know the converse either. Together they do not constitute two "alternative theories" about anything. Scientific results are forever tentative, but science remains our best true belief generator, and the line between science and the rest of our knowledge is important. Dawkins and his ilk are fools for not understanding this, and so is Ben Stein and pretty much everybody in the "ID Movement" of the DI.

Surely you don't presume to shackle all humans to this given that you can't possibly know what others knows (and don't know), along these lines.

I understand one who "doesn't know" generalizing this to everyone else because one cannot image others knowing what one doesn't know along these lines, but how is it any different than a person saying, "I cannot see blue therefore nobody else does either, and all reports of this mysterious blue are false" ?

Of course, we all can agree that subjective knowledge is of little or no use to another person who doesn't share it, unless that person is a person of trust. Even then it's iffy.

aiguy: I gave up on him when he decided language was essential to all aspects of consciousness. He was asked on a PBS special once if that meant a word processor might attain consciousness while a dog has none. His answer was close enough to "yes" for me to throw my shoe at the TV set (my dog consciously retrieved the shoe).

Hah hah.

But I still lay down a line between 'this is what I'm willing to accept' and 'this is what we know'.

This is the essence of what I argue about ID. We don't know if the cause of life was conscious, and we can't know it. And yes, we can't know the converse either. Together they do not constitute two "alternative theories" about anything. Scientific results are forever tentative, but science remains our best true belief generator, and the line between science and the rest of our knowledge is important. Dawkins and his ilk are fools for not understanding this, and so is Ben Stein and pretty much everybody in the "ID Movement" of the DI.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
Bertrand Russell

There are some propositions that are such "basic, proper beliefs" (to quote a popular theologian) that to doubt them goes beyond skepticism. If the beliefs that "other humans are conscious" and "personal computers are not conscious" are not among these propositions, I'd say nothing is.

Don't get me wrong - I'm willing to accept certain things on the basis of simple reasonableness or strength of evidence. I'm not a solipsist myself, I'm very skeptical to say the least at the proposition of my PC being conscious. But I still lay down a line between 'this is what I'm willing to accept' and 'this is what we know'. I can work with the 'basic, proper beliefs' while still reminding myself what kind of limits I'm working with, that's all. Maybe it's overdefensive, but once upon a time newtonian physics was the surest bet in the world.

What sort of research do you do?

Oh, nothing formal. Just 'checking out things that are of interest to me'.

As we learn more about what neural changes accompany the loss of consciousness, I think we can learn something about what sorts of animals have what sorts of minds.

None of this reasearch will help us decide what sort of mind might belong to something that doesn't have a brain.

Probably not. Still, I remember reading something recently - though I lost it, it was at Physorg - about how mice apparently don't recognize the passage of time in any way like humans do. Or at least that was what the research implied. I've tried finding it again, to no avail.

I gave up on him when he decided language was essential to all aspects of consciousness. He was asked on a PBS special once if that meant a word processor might attain consciousness while a dog has none. His answer was close enough to "yes" for me to throw my shoe at the TV set (my dog consciously retrieved the shoe).

I've read a lot of his assertions that I question. Never was too impressed with his intuition pumps. The one thing I thought was funny was his asserting that qualia (like the feeling of 'red') may be entirely describable in language and was wholly physical, but it would take millions of words (or millions of pages, I forget) to accurately describe. Something about that struck me as odd, or at least so close to the mysterian position that I was surprised to hear it out of him.

No - not another "agent" (that word is loaded anyway). Same person, but with a consciousness that is probably, in at least some situations, epiphenomenal!

Could be. I obviously take a different tact with this type of study - certain aspects are overblown, and other interesting avenues are ignored. To me it shows far less about the will than about what constitutes a whole human mind.

I can't argue with anything you've said here.

We don't know if machines are conscious or unconscious or have something analogous to consciousness going on. We assume they aren't/don't. We interpret data to come to a conclusion. But we have no clear path out of the solipsist forest - just arguments and axioms.

There are some propositions that are such "basic, proper beliefs" (to quote a popular theologian) that to doubt them goes beyond skepticism. If the beliefs that "other humans are conscious" and "personal computers are not conscious" are not among these propositions, I'd say nothing is.

And I think we have great warrant to assume an accompaniment to conscious reflection, or something near enough. The fact that the debate with human consciousness is so widespread and murky just leads me to believe that entertaining possibilities with big-D Design of that nature is warranted.

To me, positing consciousness is an additional, extraneous assumption, and I will always suspect it is just another instance of anthropomorphic projection (even if consciousness is the only knowable human-like trait you'd like to attribute to Him). I think we've gone as far as we can here. I have no trouble with your reasoning or conclusion (neither of us are advancing our position as a scientific hypothesis).

Say the brain is by nature extraordinarily plastic - but that highlights the problem I'm pointing out. As for your claims about the neocortex, I'd be willing to accept as much - then again, I've been doing research lately on whether insects and fish can feel pain. The lack of a neocortex sure isn't dissuading people who believe they can feel pain. I'd side with the view that no, they're not - or at least what is 'pain' to them is drastically different from what is pain to a human. Somehow, that's not stopping the arguments. They've appealed to experiments of their own (one in particular involving injecting of an irritant into fish lips.)

What sort of research do you do?

Anyway, given what I've said about the neocortex and consciousness, I suppose I ought to be sure fish don't feel pain (or they feel unconscious pain, which doesn't hurt :)). To be honest, however, my intuition is very strong that they can indeed suffer. Hmmm… In any event, I think the important point here is that research into the physical correlates of consciousness is progressing (and I think "neocortex" is already an archaically naive description). As we learn more about what neural changes accompany the loss of consciousness, I think we can learn something about what sorts of animals have what sorts of minds.

None of this reasearch will help us decide what sort of mind might belong to something that doesn't have a brain.

I think 'misrepresentation' is rampant in questions of the mind. But I don't think it's just the dualists overstating their case - everyone is, even (maybe especially) the eliminative materialists. Everyone likes to pretend that they're only motivated by the data and raw truth. In turn, I'm suspicious of all sides, even if I have one of my own.

Amen.

60%. The scientists knew what the subject would decide 60% of the time, from what I've read. So let's get that out in the open right away.

Yes (I see ranges up to 67% for different methods). Their software had to learn to recognize complex spatio-temporal patterns from the fMRI, and nobody would expect a 100% hit rate. So yes, they really could predict what the decision was to be, up to 10s before the subject made the decision, up to ~60% of the time, and the effect was not due to chance.

Second, I could have predicted with near 100% accuracy that the subjects would 'press a button' during the test. Would that mean I exhibited precognition as well?

Well, no, because the subject was already conscious of his intention to do that, and he said so.

Your third point (more to mind than immediate consciousness, even for dualists): Agreed.

Dennett's in the compatiblist camp as far as I read, so you're probably right that he could swallow the results readily if it weren't for his other commitments. Obviously I'm not all that impressed with many of his arguments, particularly relating to consciousness.

I gave up on him when he decided language was essential to all aspects of consciousness. He was asked on a PBS special once if that meant a word processor might attain consciousness while a dog has none. His answer was close enough to "yes" for me to throw my shoe at the TV set (my dog consciously retrieved the shoe).

the attack on will is strongest only if you regard the 'unconscious' as a distinct thing, almost another agent, compared to the 'conscious'.

No - not another "agent" (that word is loaded anyway). Same person, but with a consciousness that is probably, in at least some situations, epiphenomenal!

The problem is I'd go one further - I think we all have very different ideas about consciousness, volition, action, soul, mind, brain, and other topics. … So for me, I'm willing to pick up 'doubt' and 'speculation' and run with them both.

I can't argue with anything you've said here.

To recap: We know for a fact that complex behaviors that we tend to call "intelligent" can be carried out by 1) humans without conscious involvement and 2) machines without any consciousness. This to me means that even if we speculate that these sorts of complex behaviors were involved in designing life (a very speculative assumption already), we still have no warrant to assume the behaviors were accompanied by conscious reflection. You think otherwise"¦

No. Even if I grant 1, the fact that they are human means that they have a conscious life that's interplaying with their supposed sub/unconscious. (Accent on supposed; more below.) The dynamics of what's going on in that case is far from clear, even before getting to dualism. 2 though? No. We don't know if machines are conscious or unconscious or have something analogous to consciousness going on. We assume they aren't/don't. We interpret data to come to a conclusion. But we have no clear path out of the solipsist forest - just arguments and axioms. And I think we have great warrant to assume an accompaniment to conscious reflection, or something near enough. The fact that the debate with human consciousness is so widespread and murky just leads me to believe that entertaining possibilities with big-D Design of that nature is warranted.

Perhaps you know that Lorber's observations have been distorted greatly by dualism enthusiasts of all flavors.

We were talking about the usefulness of referring to brains when determining consciousness. Say the brain was merely (tremendously) compressed. Say the brain is by nature extraordinarily plastic - but that highlights the problem I'm pointing out. As for your claims about the neocortex, I'd be willing to accept as much - then again, I've been doing research lately on whether insects and fish can feel pain. The lack of a neocortex sure isn't dissuading people who believe they can feel pain. I'd side with the view that no, they're not - or at least what is 'pain' to them is drastically different from what is pain to a human. Somehow, that's not stopping the arguments. They've appealed to experiments of their own (one in particular involving injecting of an irritant into fish lips.)

Anaesthesia can make human beings lose consciousness with 100% reliability (the cases where it fails result from fear of overdose). Thus it requires a great deal of misinterpretation to believe that the utter destruction of your brain (in death) will somehow not cause you to lose consciousness.

There are a lot of questions involved with the workings of anaesthesia. On the flipside, dualism or dualistic-seeming interpretations of consciousness do not require that you have consciousness when dead. Hylomorphism can probably be called dualistic in part, since it assumes that what comprises the mind is more than the body - yet Aquinas openly speculated that without the body, the consciousness does not function. No sense, no smell, no thought, no memory, etc.

I think 'misrepresentation' is rampant in questions of the mind. But I don't think it's just the dualists overstating their case - everyone is, even (maybe especially) the eliminative materialists. Everyone likes to pretend that they're only motivated by the data and raw truth. In turn, I'm suspicious of all sides, even if I have one of my own.

The subjects had to decide to press one of two buttons. Subjects reported to have consciously decided which of the buttons to press, and when to press it, about 1 second before they pressed the button. Activity associated with the motor event were detected up to 10 seconds before the button press. Trials were repeated, freely paced by the subject, averaging about 20s between trials. Brain activity could be discriminated between the decision to press button 1 or 2, so the brain researchers could predict which button the subject would eventually consciously "decide" to pick.

In other words, the scientists knew what the subject would consciously "decide" to do before the subject knew this. If the decision was really freely made only at the time the subject became aware of it, this would mean the scientists exhibited precognition.

60%. The scientists knew what the subject would decide 60% of the time, from what I've read. So let's get that out in the open right away.

Second, I could have predicted with near 100% accuracy that the subjects would 'press a button' during the test. Would that mean I exhibited precognition as well?

Third, for the hell of it I can go ahead and grant every result you're saying. There was a decision before the subject expressed conscious awareness of it. But even there, the decision is still being made by the same person - the subject. You can respond 'Well, those decisions are being made their unconscious.' But how unconscious is it if it's able to exhibit awareness, make a decision, and communicate with the 'conscious'? I'm not sure all or even most of the most hardened dualists would object to the idea that there's more to the self than the immediate conscious. And ceding all this still doesn't make conscious life acausal - the two feed each other, by my view. (Now, whether the actual qualia-experiencing aspect of conscious life is epiphenomenal is another story. But right here I'm talking about 'decisions and thoughts made consciously'.)

I'm not talking about Libet; I'm talking about Soon et al. This study was specifically designed to eliminate this potential objection, and it did. We're talking about up to ten seconds! (I haven't seen Dennett or any of the usual gang talk about the Soon study yet. Of course Dennett doesn't like the results; not because he's a fan of free will, obviously, but because it mucks with his multiple-drafts ideas).

Dennett's in the compatiblist camp as far as I read, so you're probably right that he could swallow the results readily if it weren't for his other commitments. Obviously I'm not all that impressed with many of his arguments, particularly relating to consciousness.

But even with Soon, the predictions were 60% successful as near as I've read (I'd love to read the actual peer-reviewed paper or source of every scientific question I come across, but I don't have that kind of money), and the attack on will is strongest only if you regard the 'unconscious' as a distinct thing, almost another agent, compared to the 'conscious'. These questions have a whole lot of ontology in play, which is part of the reason I said "have no use for"; they don't accomplish nearly what many people claim they do.

But the truth remains: We are at least sometimes very wrong about our intuitive, common-sense ideas regarding the relationship between consciousness, volition, and action. I think this is well beyond doubt. Which places reasoning about intelligent behavior requiring conscious volition in entities that are vastly dissimilar to human beings into a great deal of doubt.

The problem is I'd go one further - I think we all have very different ideas about consciousness, volition, action, soul, mind, brain, and other topics. We've had them for a long while as well. So to me, our understanding of the wide range of makeups, operations, issues, and questions with regards to human brains and consciousness - the things all of us are most intimately familiar with - lends support to the idea that we should be free to speculate just what the potentials and role of intelligence and consciousness in our universe may be. It doesn't mean we have license to approach the subject with certainty; then again, I don't think we ever really had certainty of that particular level. So for me, I'm willing to pick up 'doubt' and 'speculation' and run with them both.

You're well informed in all of the aspects of all the issues, and make cogent arguments for your point of view. Just astonishing.

I appreciate the compliment, and obviously you're very well-informed as well. I'm most appreciative that the conversation can remain civil despite disagreement.

Conscious direction is in the driver's seat in a typical person.

To recap: We know for a fact that complex behaviors that we tend to call "intelligent" can be carried out by 1) humans without conscious involvement and 2) machines without any consciousness. This to me means that even if we speculate that these sorts of complex behaviors were involved in designing life (a very speculative assumption already), we still have no warrant to assume the behaviors were accompanied by conscious reflection. You think otherwise…

I'd go another route - I'm not convinced the neurobiological structures of humans are necessarily critical for humans. Look up John Lorber's "Do you need a brain to think?" He believes you need a brain to think and be conscious. I can accept that. He also pointed at studies where some people missing tremendous amounts of brain matter had above-average IQs, were functionally normal, etc. So what can constitute a brain in humans is extremely broad. I have to ask myself, given that and other neurological surprises (Patients in comas whose brains repair themselves over years), how useful is the reference? My response: "Useful to a point. Not as much as I once thought."

Perhaps you know that Lorber's observations have been distorted greatly by dualism enthusiasts of all flavors. His subjects were not actually missing any critical brain structures; rather they were compressed by hydroencephaly, and where they were too damaged, severe mental impairments were seen. There is simply no question whatsoever that if your neocortex is removed you will be unconscious. I see the misinterpretation of Lorber's cases as an indication of how far people will go to believe our individual consciousness might survive death (like Frank Tipler's bizarre "The Physics of Immortality").

Anaesthesia can make human beings lose consciousness with 100% reliability (the cases where it fails result from fear of overdose). Thus it requires a great deal of misinterpretation to believe that the utter destruction of your brain (in death) will somehow not cause you to lose consciousness.

As for the experiment: "Unconcsious determinants of free decisions in the human brain" (Nature Neuroscience, 4/13/2008): The subjects had to decide to press one of two buttons. Subjects reported to have consciously decided which of the buttons to press, and when to press it, about 1 second before they pressed the button. Activity associated with the motor event were detected up to 10 seconds before the button press. Trials were repeated, freely paced by the subject, averaging about 20s between trials. Brain activity could be discriminated between the decision to press button 1 or 2, so the brain researchers could predict which button the subject would eventually consciously "decide" to pick.

In other words, the scientists knew what the subject would consciously "decide" to do before the subject knew this. If the decision was really freely made only at the time the subject became aware of it, this would mean the scientists exhibited precognition.

So no, your intepretation doesn't work. If the decision to press one of the buttons actually happened long before the experiment started, why wasn't the subject aware of which button she would press? How could her brain be preparing for pressing a sequence of difference buttons in anticipation of the actual buttons she would press if the real decision was when the subject thought it was? Barring some bizarre time-travelling epicycle, it is clear that the decision which the subject believed was responsible for selecting the button and initiating the action could not possibly have been responsible for it.

Sure there's an issue - even Dennett has brought as much up. There's going to be a lag before the subject noticing the external position/letter, and the report. You can't be asserting it's literally instantaneous, can you? We're dealing with tests that have relevant measures in the tens of milliseconds. And again, no - if I consciously report that I'm consciously aware of my decision, there's a lag time between the awareness and the report to begin with. It takes time, even if it's a small amount, to go from 'I'm aware' to 'I'm telling you I'm aware'. Remember: Milliseconds count here.

I'm not talking about Libet; I'm talking about Soon et al. This study was specifically designed to eliminate this potential objection, and it did. We're talking about up to ten seconds! (I haven't seen Dennett or any of the usual gang talk about the Soon study yet. Of course Dennett doesn't like the results; not because he's a fan of free will, obviously, but because it mucks with his multiple-drafts ideas).

Give them 1 of 50 buttons to press, argue that they didn't decide which specific button to press before they sat down, or even before they moved their hand. My response is the same: They still decided in advance to commit to the action in principle. If we're talking about conscious volition, this is fair to bring up. 'No, because that falls outside the bounds of the test' yields 'Then it's a pretty bad test for what you're measuring'.

You are saying that even if the specifics about precisely when to press a button and precisely which button to press may have been determined unconsciously in the seconds preceding each trial, the general overarching decision to participate at all was still an instance conscious volition - right? It has certainly been argued that while button-pressing decisions may be unconsciously determined, other sorts of (more important) decisions may not be. Sure, fine. But the truth remains: We are at least sometimes very wrong about our intuitive, common-sense ideas regarding the relationship between consciousness, volition, and action. I think this is well beyond doubt. Which places reasoning about intelligent behavior requiring conscious volition in entities that are vastly dissimilar to human beings into a great deal of doubt.

Added:
I am compelled to reiterate: How surprising it is to have this discussion with you! Over the past few years, I've argued ID on four or five different boards, trying to get people to understand the connection between ID and our understanding of minds, brains, and consciousness. You are the very first person who gets it, and in fact understood all of these connections already. You're well informed in all of the aspects of all the issues, and make cogent arguments for your point of view. Just astonishing.

To summarize/clarify our positions (please correct me where I have you wrong):

We agree that the meaning of "intelligence" in ID critically entails "consciousness".

You think the evidence of cognitive science tends to show that virtually the entirety of our cognition is driven by consciousness. I disagree: I think data clearly shows that we are conscious of only a small portion of our cognition, and our brains constantly carry out complex planning tasks without conscious involvement.

I think ID entails 'consciousness, or something close enough'. Whatever is the ultimate source of design, I don't think it's 1:1 with a human brain. But we can certainly speculate what said source is like.

I'm sure our brains do carry out day to day tasks without our direct conscious involvement. I breathe without paying much attention, my heart beats, etc. But I'd liken it to how a fry cook carries out a lot of tasks without the CEO of McDonalds being involved. Conscious direction is in the driver's seat in a typical person.

And so, you believe that anything which could produce a complex machine (like biological systems, or a computer system) is likely to be conscious. In contrast, I think that AI systems are existence proofs that machines (algorithmic/stochastic natural processes) are capable of producing complex machines, and that these machines are likely not conscious.

Actually, I'm neutral on that topic. But I don't think that it's clear cut; I believe that at the very least, an AI can be considered part of a conscious agent. I don't think my brain is my mind, or that my brain and body is my mind. So I have intuitions/considerations about computers that are problematic before the question of 'is this system itself conscious' is even asked.

We agree that the solution to the problem of other minds rests squarely on our subjective estimation of similarity between the entity in question and ourselves.

I don't think it's a solution. I do think it's all we have to work with, and any conclusion we make there involves a leap. I'd agree that operational similarity is all we can go on.

I believe that our ability to judge this similarity has been enhanced by neurobiology, so we can judge the similarity of the neural structures we've identified as being involved in consciousness. You disagree: You believe that these neural structures (the physical correlates of consciousness) in humans are not an important indicator of the likelihood of consciousness; they only happen to be critical for humans, but not for other conscious beings.

I'd go another route - I'm not convinced the neurobiological structures of humans are necessarily critical for humans. Look up John Lorber's "Do you need a brain to think?" He believes you need a brain to think and be conscious. I can accept that. He also pointed at studies where some people missing tremendous amounts of brain matter had above-average IQs, were functionally normal, etc. So what can constitute a brain in humans is extremely broad. I have to ask myself, given that and other neurological surprises (Patients in comas whose brains repair themselves over years), how useful is the reference? My response: "Useful to a point. Not as much as I once thought."

So I assume if we succeeded at building a computer that rivalled human abilities of creative design you would tend to believe that this machine is probably conscious? Yet I assume the creative ability for a computer to generate and execute brilliant plans for winning chess does not convince you that Deep Blue is conscious?

I'd entertain the possibility it was conscious if it displayed a conscious will. Turing test, blah blah. I've already seen computer programs that use evolutionary approaches to create extraordinarily efficient transistors. My position is best summed up as 'open minded, but rarely truly convinced'.

Rather, I make fun of Egnor et al because they make incredibly stupid arguments.

The folks that give ID a bad name - the DI gang - first attempt to disguise ID's commitments regarding dualism, and then present the silliest arguments (and arguers) possible in support of those commitments!

I've not read the books/articles you mentioned. Actually, most of the DI types who argue regarding the mind seem to argue less in favor of dualism, and more against materialism. In the latter case, I've seen them make some good points. But I'll admit, I've not followed them very close - I didn't read the books, etc.

It makes no sense to imagine that I have already decided in advance which buttons I'm going to push. I follow instructions, and make decisions about which buttons to press the way I make all such decisions: I think about them, and at some point I consciously decide NOW, and then I press the button that I consciously intended to press. I am shocked when I find out that ten seconds before I decided I was going to press button A, the scientists could see that my brain was already preparing to do exactly that.

I didn't say you already decided in advance which specific buttons to push. Only that you've decided in advance to push buttons. If I sign up for an experiment and am told, 'Okay, we're going to hook this equipment up to you, and in a given time frame, you push a button. Okay?' I agree. Ten minutes later, everything is set up, the time frame starts, I press the button. "Aha!" the experimenters say. "Your subconscious brain was preparing to press the button before you were aware of it!" "Aha!" I say. "I knew I was going to press a button ten minutes ago when you told me the experiment's instructions." Why should I pay attention to my subconscious activity to press the button, but not my conscious decision to commit to the test - which included a commitment to press the button?

You can alter that to 'press one of three buttons', and I only made the decision to press button 2 at the last moment, but my subconscious was getting ready seconds in advance. Great; I still agreed beforehand, consciously. So how surprised should I be about all of this?

The subject notes on a clock (actually a stream of letters passing on a screen) the moment that she decides, so there is no issue regarding the time it takes to signal the experimenter. It is also an unworkable notion to say that we might be conscious of our decision before we consciously notice that we are conscious of our decision

Sure there's an issue - even Dennett has brought as much up. There's going to be a lag before the subject noticing the external position/letter, and the report. You can't be asserting it's literally instantaneous, can you? We're dealing with tests that have relevant measures in the tens of milliseconds. And again, no - if I consciously report that I'm consciously aware of my decision, there's a lag time between the awareness and the report to begin with. It takes time, even if it's a small amount, to go from 'I'm aware' to 'I'm telling you I'm aware'. Remember: Milliseconds count here.

This before other questions I have about subjective awareness and communication.

Yes, in order to retain your idea of conscious volition, you could imagine that the subjects can't tell when they are making a conscious decision, or are lying about it. I don't think this is the most reasonable interpretation of the data.

While I can ask pertinent questions (I think I already have with regards to timing, previously), I don't need to question any of that to retain conscious volition - I've already said that the subjects made a conscious decision to press the button before the test even began. Give them 1 of 50 buttons to press, argue that they didn't decide which specific button to press before they sat down, or even before they moved their hand. My response is the same: They still decided in advance to commit to the action in principle. If we're talking about conscious volition, this is fair to bring up. 'No, because that falls outside the bounds of the test' yields 'Then it's a pretty bad test for what you're measuring'.

You tell me: Do conscious acts prime unconscious acts? They certainly seem to. Do unconscious acts prime conscious acts? You're asserting as much. My response has been that, if that's the case, then it's a fluxuating scenario - unconscious primes conscious primes unconscious primes conscious primes, etc. Your response seems to be 'No, unconscious primes conscious, and that's that'. If that's a correct summary of your position, it's not at all convincing to me.