This is a well known experiment that has deep implications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_free_will see Libet experiment among others). It doesn't question free will directly. Making decisions without being consciously aware doesn't contraindicate free will.
Personally, I side with Dennett (as always).
Also, many studies have n=12 and still have statistical power.
I imagine that it takes longer for your vision system to generate a useful output than whatever is responsible for telling you that you just stubbed your toe.
If signals like touch, smell, sight, etc. arrived at the input to your perceptual system immediately, you'd get a bunch of inputs for the same event at different times, and it would probably be difficult for your perceptual system to make sense of of them.
I think the only thing the spinning wheel experiment shows is that the brain has some sort of perceptual delay/compensation mechanism that's probably there to account for these differences in input processing times. And it probably backdates the "timestamp" of the event so that things that rely on short time intervals (e.g. control tasks like balancing) still work reliably.
I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will. Philosophers are weird.
> I don't know why anybody would think this says anything about free will.
If some decisions that we think are made consciously are actually unconscious, then how do we know that any decisions we make are really conscious decisions?
What if our consciousness makes no decisions, and is just a figment of our imagination.
Personally, I side with Dennett (as always).
Also, many studies have n=12 and still have statistical power.