Yes, we're all very sure now about that. We have a 100% consensus on that.
Only a future special commission on the subject could make us change our mind.
EB
I'm fairly sure there are probably boffins working on it as we speak. They might be discussing wormholes in spacetime or something.
It's sort of annoying that we don't really know for sure if an experience of a conscious intention to move an arm comes before an arm move or not, or during or after, in any particular 'arm manoevure'.
What matters is that the brain should select the action before making sure the action takes place. And I'm pretty sure it's what is happening most of the time.
So I'll take this from the other end of the conundrum. I don't think it would be good for our own safety if we could select an action way before we would be to do it. Instead, it would be best if we had the impression that what we do follows from what we decide to do on the spur of the moment. Any other way would just be confusing, unsafe and ultimately a good reason for evolution to let us go extinct.
Also, if we keep to the distinction between mind and brain as different parts of reality, we can take the brain as a pure product of evolution and stop looking at the brain as anything but a straightforward control system making decisions on the spur of the moment on the basis of the information available to it from its various detectors. The brain is obviously just that. I can't see a natural process ending up in the existence of such things as brains if they're not just control systems.
So, given the length of communication lines and the time required to get a muscle to contract, I think it should be expected that the action selected by the brain just follows within a fraction of a second.
Also, human complex societies wouldn't be possible without the ability to plan our actions well ahead. But even here, we need to retain our ability to go ahead with an action only on the basis of an assessment of the present circumstances.
And, obviously, being fastidiously conscious of things is costly in energy and process time. So our brain needs to be able to focus one of its parts on a limited selection of things while some other parts of the brain run routine actions such as breathing and pumping blood into our arteries. Things we never actually care how they run even though they're absolutely vital unlike the issue of whether there is a God up there. We would just die right there if it were just for our conscious mind (thank God we don't!).
So, the assumption that we would have anything remotely like a "downward causality" option available to us for running our lives flies in the face of all the evidence we have about how our bodies are the result of the 4.5 billion years physical process of evolution. Me, i can't see that happening unless there's a funny God playing tricks on us.
Now, why would we need to be conscious of our brain's selection of an action if it meant the action had to be delayed? Most of the time that wouldn't be good. I can see how I would stop making typing mistakes if I concentrated on each one move of my fingers but it would also take something like one hundred times longer. Typing a typical e-mail, I would just die of hunger. So, I can elect to do it, but my unconscious brain will anyway retain the control of the action simply because my conscious mind isn't at all competent to do it. My conscious mind is competent to look at things from the chairman's seat while letting the competent and fussy workers work their magic unbeknownst to me. And there is really nothing in my personal experience of doing things that would contradict this description of the problem.
EB
