flight recorder

lack of centralized decision making (e.g. your hand moves to press a button, but this action does not occur as a result of an actual specific point where you decided to press it) does not preclude a sensible notion of introspection or “"free will”“ but only necessarily implies that the function of rationalization is not handled in the same place that the impulse was produced. this does not mean that the rationalization is necessarily untrustworthy. the mechanism producing it had at least some access to previous experiences of the action-doer as well as the experience of doing it in the moment, or at least the result. we should trust "I thought and felt this way…” from the mouth of the thinker and feeler because there is no better investigator and no more higher and accurate notion of thinking and feeling in the first place. it is unfair to call this “retroactive introspection” because it is the best notion of introspection that we have.

contrast an LLM. it cannot introspect more accurately than an outside observer, and we even have an advantage over itself because we can be inside observers and it cannot! an LLM consists of vast intermediate steps that are completely lost when the output is produced. the closest thing that it has to inside information is its attention, which fades away at a certain point. we are in a much better position to understand why an LLM produced a certain output than the LLM itself.