In the normal course of affairs, there isn’t such a disengagement. We go through a mental process that is typically called “choice,” where we think about the consequences of our actions. There is nothing magical about this. The neural basis of mental life is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought—with neural systems that analyze different options, construct logical chains of argument, reason through examples and analogies, and respond to the anticipated consequences of actions.
In this summation there’s also nothing here to require the existence of a unitary “self” that is guiding any of the processes. Yes there are varying degrees of aberration from the normal, but these are all statistical variations from an individually perceived mean. This is hardly free will.
