Newscientist ran an intruiging article about new understanding of the nature of human consciousness in relation to free-will. It led me search for more info, and I found these sources
From Newscientist:
What they have revealed is that a good 90 per cent of what most people do in any day follows routines so complete that their behaviour can be predicted with just a few mathematical equations.
Meditators quickly come to realize that what we think we are “doing”, is actually not consciously decided upon – it only seems that way after we notice what we did. Try to stop your thoughts, and you will quickly see that you don’t decide to have them. At least, the decision is not merely a simple matter of consciously directing attention.
Where our information processing becomes conscious as awareness may be analagous to how photons collapse from a wave of indeterminate, volume filling potention, to discreet moments of time and space. The discreet moments of consciousness react with the wavefronts of the unconscious information being processed, analagous to electron clouds refracting and deflecting non-discreet wavefronts of light. I use this analogy to imply that conscious awareness may not directly cause our willed actions, and may usually only seem to exert influence, but that it is also a part of the underlying system, and so influences causation.