Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> As an individual, yes, knowing I am hungry or cold or in pain is simple.
> As a scientist, understanding that separation of the first nerve impulse
> and when it transforms into knowing, is interesting. 

All agreed, yes. That's why I said one has to be careful how to define free 
will before arguing about whether it exists or not.

> That is why I use know in quotes. There is a point where the stimulus
> crosses from sub-conscious to conscious, if that is where you want to
> define "knowing"[1]. 

Well, specifically, knowing you've made a particular choice. Clearly it's 
possible to react to things before you consciously know it. I just thought 
this was an interesting experiment in that I can know what your choice is 
far enough before you do that I can thwart your choice (say, by grabbing 
from your hand the button you were about to push).

I think an experiment where the person monitoring tells the person deciding 
what his decision is before he's aware of it could be very interesting. Will 
the person pick a different button? Will the person claim they weren't 
planning to pick either button yet? How late can you tell the person before 
they can no longer help but push the button they were thinking of?

> should we discount them all as unknown until the entire thought gets to
> the conscious level?

I think that knowing something at the gut level is generally colloquially 
considered not knowing it. You can hear people say "I knew something was 
wrong but I didn't know what" if they see an odd situation and (say) cross 
the street to avoid getting attacked. In this case, they really don't know 
*why* they crossed the street - they just know their brain noticed something 
that didn't perk all the way up to the self awareness, but rather manifested 
in the self-awareness as something unusual and fearful, say.

So yeah, I'd say the gut feeling is known, but not the details of why you 
are having that gut feeling. Clearly there is processing that happens in the 
nervous system that isn't reflected directly in the part of the brain 
modeling itself.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Forget "focus follows mouse." When do
   I get "focus follows gaze"?

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