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An experiment was done in the late sixties where a subject was hooked up to a monitor. Then the subject was given a trigger which stopped a clock when pressed. He was instructed to pull the trigger on the spur of the moment, then record the time when the clock stopped.

I can’t remember all the details, but what they found was that seconds before the subject reported making a conscious decision to stop the clock, signals were already building up in the muscles that controlled the trigger.

IOW, the little guy sitting in our heads who makes conscious decisions is really under the influence of something happening at a deeper level and the notion of free will needs tempering.

I can’t remember all the details, but what they found was that seconds before the subject reported making a conscious decision to stop the clock, signals were already building up in the muscles that controlled the trigger.

I have conscious experience of this phenomenon, from my habit of playing the ancient game of "Toejam and Earl" ( 1891 ... oops, I guess 1991 )

In the course of play, one can open various "presents" in the form of gift wrapped boxes, which can be good or bad. The worst, in my estimation, is the RANDOMIZER, which causes all the present wrappers, or boxes, to be reset at random, relative to the contents, which otherwise are identified, once having been opened.

Well, anyway, this creates a great tension between wanting to open "unkown" presents ( identified by "???" ) and waiting to have them identified by paying the Carot Man ... it's complicated.

But suffice it to say that this tension between opening, and not opening becomes palpable, and on many occasions, despite a stern conviction NOT to open an unknown present ( lest it be the RANDOMIZER ) I will feel overcome by an urge to do so, and in effect helplessly stand by while it happens. ... Weird!

“IOW, the little guy sitting in our heads who makes conscious decisions is really under the influence of something happening at a deeper level and the notion of free will needs tempering.”

That conclusion isn’t actually sustainable from the evidence of such an experiment, since you cannot scientifically quantify what “free will” is. You have conflated it with some pattern of electrical pulses in the brain, yet you have no way of actually verifying that hypothesis.