Mmm, I think your brain smears consciousness over a short rolling period of time. It has the machinery in there already because it has to coordinate signals fro

Mmm, I think your brain smears consciousness over a short rolling period of time. It has the machinery in there already because it has to coordinate signals from your extremities which can take a hundred or more ms to propagate to the brain. You might find this experiment interesting [0] where a scanner can see that you've made a decision slightly before you're conscious of the fact that you've decided. Also Joe Armstrong (creator of Erlang) has an interesting, if not especially scientific, post [1] looking at the brain and consciousness from something of a distributed systems (Erlang bread & butter) perspective you might find interesting. (That said, since I sometimes wake up 1-5 minutes before the alarm, I don't completely buy his explanation, but it's still an interesting read.) [0] http://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ http://www.wired.com/2008/04/mind-decision/ [1] http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html http://joearms.github.io/2015/03/02/Waking-Up.html