^ That's a good excerpt. I would go as far as saying all of our conscious experience is confabulation. Many many components are working to fill in holes in a data stream that is smaller than you'd think (once you factor in saccadic motion, for example) by interpolation or inference. The fact that much of our internal awareness is in the form of language only further confirms that we are synthesising complex constructs from simpler ones (percept -> concept -> concrete) and using context to add in missing information.
But I don't think that's an example of someone coercing themselves. I don't even think that statement makes much sense. All decisions are the result of systems competing to select an action given a set of inputs. We confabulate the decision as "us" deciding, but Libet showed that this isn't the way it happens, and that's not surprising, because as you'd imagine the complex synthesis is computationally expensive and therefore slower than the instinctual, more "ancient" brain that is actually driving our actions. The internal narrative we experience may complain that some of our higher-level desires were trumped by our lower-level ones, but in the end it is the same systems making the same calculation: we take the action that manages to shout loudest, though there is much plasticity in the way we learn to adjust the weightings of some actions throughout our lives.
But I don't think that's an example of someone coercing themselves. I don't even think that statement makes much sense. All decisions are the result of systems competing to select an action given a set of inputs. We confabulate the decision as "us" deciding, but Libet showed that this isn't the way it happens, and that's not surprising, because as you'd imagine the complex synthesis is computationally expensive and therefore slower than the instinctual, more "ancient" brain that is actually driving our actions. The internal narrative we experience may complain that some of our higher-level desires were trumped by our lower-level ones, but in the end it is the same systems making the same calculation: we take the action that manages to shout loudest, though there is much plasticity in the way we learn to adjust the weightings of some actions throughout our lives.
