I'm going to be naive and open about how your answer make me feel because I believe it may help understand why and where we don't speak the same language, at the risk of giving the impression that I'm looking down at it. Be assured that it is not the case, please bear with me.

I don't see the point of the "spy glasses" since the animation we see with or without the glasses is exactly the same - supposedly the glasses do not alter the vision so the flips experienced by the observer would be the same with or without the glasses.

> Suppose you are watching a recording of someone else's A) variant, effectively you may be seen as a passive spectator of a prerecording of this other person

I assume you mean I'm watching at the recording made by the glasses, so that I see kind of "through the eyes" of the previous observer.

I do not fully understand why you had to resort to a visual illusion. If the participant is just asked to say a random number between 1 and 10 every minute, and I'm listening to the recording of the experiment while at the same time being subjected to it myself, I will also utter the same number once every 10 minutes in average.
And of course, in the "B" version of that variant of the experiment based on random numbers, I would "agree" with me all the time because there is nothing else to compare to.

I don't see the connection with the question of

> How do you explain that discrepancy in statistics?

This sounds silly. I explain the different result from the fact that it's a different experiment. In the first case I'm comparing my own "random flips" to someone elses, and in the second I'm doing no such comparison.

> How was your brain and body able to systematically express what your supposedly 100% passive "mind" homunculus observed?

My passive "homunculus" does not observe the movie of the rotating figure, and does no say anything about how it experiences the movie. It merely observes my brain interpretation of the rotating figure, while it listens to my brain uttering in which direction the figure is rotating. It is "out of the loop".

(for the purpose of this discussion, the brain is just part of the body, right?)

Using the same experiment, let me try to demonstrate that the experiencing subject can only be passive.

I do not know how you stand on the "neural networks do/do not experience self consciousness" debate, and it does not matter. For this though experiment all I need is that you agree that it is possible in theory to build a large neural network that experiences _no_ consciousness whatsoever. Just a stupid machine made of cogs and gears if you prefer that to a weight matrix, but enough of them that it has the capacity to be given a set of pictures as input and, if that set of pictures represent a movie of some rotating object, it would flash a green light if the object is rotating clockwise, and a red one if it's rotating counter-clockwise.

Of course, if subjected to the optical illusion of the rotating ballerina, the machine would be confused and, sometime flashes red and sometimes green.

Now, in principle, we can improve this machine to make it more "brain-like" by enlarging the simulation (or adding more cogs), until eventually we can simulate the exact body (including the brain) of the human being participating in your experiment well enough that we can predict in which direction he will see the figure rotating and when he will experience flips, because the machine will see the exact same thing in the same way and, reproducing the same brain circuitry than the human subject, will be confused in exactly the same way at the same moment.

So, we can predict what the subject will "experience" with a machine that does not experience anything.
Therefore, the fact that the human subject experiences anything at all is totally irrelevant to what he will say the rotation is (like the angels "pushing" the moon are irrelevant to explain the motion of the moon).

And actually, similar experiences are being done at least since the 90s ; not with a large brain simulation but just by measuring the brain activity of the subject and being able to predict what he is going to say before he actually has a conscious experience of it. Three papers from a quick internet search:

- https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2008.751

- https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1212218110

- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-39813-y

Don't you think that all this point strongly toward a "one way function"?