Comment by adornKey

The relation of consciousness and being in control is interesting. I'm not so sure about the decision-making experiments - maybe they just measured latency in the communication layers?

I think being in control is a rare thing. It's hard to change even the smallest habits - the default result is failure - but sometimes it's possible. The only thing that seems to work reliably is subconscious manipulation of people using propaganda and repetition. That's for me the main reason to believe that at least 90% of people don't have active functional consciousness in their loop.

Decisions of Plants work in different time scales, so they're hard to perceive, but I don't think they work that different - it all boils down to maximising some gain-function using some chemistry for memory.

Your theory about going automaton is interesting. I've seen intelligent persons that communicated very well going "crazy". (I think women do that a lot) - like a looping LLM. And later they came back to normal - but since then I have some doubts about their internal state...