The conscious "why" comes after the decision. In that sense it's exactly the kind of bullshit machine that LLMs are.
Note: if the result is someone reporting having made a decision before brain activity is seen, my next question is going to be "How does that work?"
An important statement in the article is this...
>“As the decision of what to think about is made, executive areas of the brain choose the thought-trace which is stronger. In, other words, if any pre-existing brain activity matches one of your choices, then your brain will be more likely to pick that option as it gets boosted by the pre-existing brain activity.
If you observe con men, politicians, and advertisers, they'll commonly use precursors to pre-prime the pump in influencing what you'll agree to.
This is not how we figure conscious explanations are often(always?) post-hoc rationalizations.
See -
Split brain experiments - https://www.nature.com/articles/483260a
Experiments on Choice preferences -https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3196841/
Here's a study from 2009 showing that the problem gets solved but it takes up to 8 seconds for the person to announce that the problem is solved.
Showing that even for problem solving, there's a giant unconscious machinery that is active. Although I assume they cannot discount the effects of the conscious bits (struggle, suffering, anxiety, active as a mirror of that problem solving effort being a feedback loop to this unconscious effort).
My Ph.D is actually about this. Here's a paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...