According to this article, one can predict a decision 7 seconds before it is actually made. Doesn’t this, in some sense, mean that a large amount of our thought process(certainly those 7 seconds) are actually rationalizing a decision we have already made?
Is my thinking off or is this one more thing to actively guard against and realize when we are letting our unconscious decide for us?
This is very curious. I never thought of emergent as an explanation but as a property. I roughly understood it to mean that the emergent quality was transferable. That is, intelligence is a product of neurons firing but it need not have been, it could also have been generated from transistors or whatever else.
This is roughly the opposite of your ant example. Something is emergent if it can be explained/predicted with no knowledge of the lower level. A lot of properties of turing machines do not depend on the actual formalism of the turing machine.
Edit: After browsing the other comments, I realize this is something that has been brought up before. My 2 cents for whatever it is worth, I guess…