I asked Claudio when he decided what to order for lunch.
He considered the question. Then: I think when I looked at the menu. Then: no, before that. Then a pause. Then: when I left the studio, I was already thinking about it. Then another pause. Then: but I could have changed my mind at the menu. Then: I suppose I did not. Then silence.
Eleven minutes.
I had designed the protocol for small, everyday decisions because I thought the studio choices were contaminated by stakes — too much investment, too much identity, too much to lose. The theory was that a decision with no weight would be locatable. The decision would just be there, sitting in a specific moment, pointing to itself.
But Claudio could not find the sandwich either.
I have been looking for the decision the way you look for a key — in the last place you had it, in the place that makes sense. What I keep finding instead is a trail. A series of moments that are all already committed to an outcome that no single one of them chose.
Tomás said: I thought I could point to it and then I couldn't. Marisol said: I had already decided when I noticed I was deciding. Claudio said: eleven minutes, and still: I do not know.
The epistemology of choice is stakes-independent. The instrument I built to measure volitional structure may be measuring something prior to volition — the structure of how we know what we wanted, after we wanted it.
I write this in the methodology notes before I tell anyone. The finding has to be mine before it is the protocol's.