10/26/22: Precognitive Carousel

There's a rumored experiment called the "precognitive carousel", supposedly run by Grey Walter, where:

(1) Subjects are told to push a button to advance a slide projector carousel, but not told that the button is inert

(2) The carousel advances based on electrical signals measured by wires on the subjects' scalp.

(3) Subjects supposedly report the uncanny feeling that the projector advances "just before" they were about to push the button -- 300-400 milliseconds before, a pretty long time.

The writer suggested this research supports the idea that your body chooses what to do, then informs your brain, and your consciousness convinces itself that has decided to do what the body is about to do on its own.

John had been living in a memory all his life. Or at least that’s what the brochure told him.

“Unshackle your mind! Live in the present! Get UnBuffered today!” There was an image of a smiling middle-aged couple looking towards the horizon on the cover. If he didn’t know better he would have thought it was a generic ad for an erectile dysfunction medication.

When he was younger he used to make fun of the Boomers, who seemed out-of-touch with the rest of world. He remembered sitting at Thanksgiving dinner, and his uncle would make an off-handed comment about “I respect the transgenders but don’t support them!” He remembered his grandfather somehow still using an AOL email account in 2020, because that was what he had been using for the past twenty years.

Now it was John who was out of touch. He was at the clinic because of his children. They had both gotten UnBuffered, and for the past several months it was all they could talk about. He had been skeptical at first. Had fought it. But he could feel himself slipping behind, fossilizing, becoming more out-of-touch with the younger generations. He didn’t want that to happen. He didn’t want to be the grandfather using AOL.

“John Hunterton?” a nurse called out. 

John followed her to the clinic room. It was nice and sterile-looking. A Where’s Waldo print hung on the wall, presumably to distract those who were kept waiting.

The doctor came in. 

“You’ve already signed the consent forms?” she said, without introducing herself. 

“Yes.”

“Any last questions before we begin then?” 

He nearly said something. But stopped himself. He wondered if she was UnBuffered. She must be. Maybe that was why she was so impatient. It must feel to her like he was always a second behind.

“Good. Lean forward, put your chin on the strap. Good, good… You’ll feel a pressure in the back of your head in 3, 2, 1…”

There was a bee-sting in the back of his neck, and then - 

The world blurred, changed, then came back into focus. 

“Welcome to the present,” the doctor said with a smile. “Don’t stand up too quickly. It’ll take some time to orient yourself.”

John couldn’t stand up if he tried. He thought for a moment that he was paralyzed, but then just realized that he had been waiting for his body to move on its own… and for the first time in his life that didn’t happen.

“What you’re feeling is the disorientation of having your consciousness finally catch up with your subconsciousness in real-time. Previously, your subconsciousness was making all of the decisions, and your consciousness was just experiencing the memory of those decisions one second later. Your brain used sleight of hand to edit your memories to make you think you had actually made those decisions, when in fact your conscious self was just a passenger.”

John barely heard her. He decided to move his head back, and suddenly it worked.

“But in fact, your consciousness was always living one second in the past. It never had free will to do anything at all.”

He decided to stand up, and it happened. That in of itself felt like a revelation. 

“So this is in fact the first time that you’ve ever had free will… ever. Schizophrenia patients often describe their dissociation symptoms as their conscious mind observing someone else driving their body. When their condition is treated, they say, ‘oh! I’m finally in control.’ But in fact, for most of human history, everyone was like that. We just had no other experience to compare it to. Until now.”

John smiled. And it was a real smile because it happened both consciously and subconsciously at the same time. He both chose and didn’t choose to do so.

“We call the state of being you’re now experiencing as ‘undissociation.’ You are to your old self what your old self would have been to a schizophrenic experiencing dissociation. For most aspects of your life, you won’t notice too much functional difference. Your reaction time will be slightly but noticeably better. Your emotions will seem to come from conscious choice rather than an invisible internal well. But the feeling of being in control for the first time… The deep-in-the-bones understanding that you’ve woken up - that you finally have free will for the first time…. That is truly divine. And impossible to explain until you’ve experienced it.”

John paused. He felt joy in knowing that he was choosing to feel joy and also that he was choosing to stay silent right then, he felt sadness at having waited for so long to become UnBuffered, he felt his subconscious present him with choices to make in instantaneous slices of time layered one after another, and his consciousness loop back into his subconscious like an ouroboros, and he felt each moment somehow longer and more saturated with meaning then somehow the sum total of his entire life up until that moment, and then - 

“Thank you,” he chose to say. 

“You’re welcome,” the doctor chose to say back. 

And after a brief moment of acknowledgement towards one another, he chose to walk out of the room, free.