As someone who works in the biomedical imaging business and is also a fan of philosophy, I think this news will matter more to folks in the latter camp. For a couple years now philosophers have insisted that fMRI images prove there is no such thing as free will. Today's revelation should put an end to that whole line of reasoning (and the absurd amount of fatalism that it engendered). (The back story: Apparently fMRI…
Free will as in "there's something that can't be explained by chemistry and electrical signals in the brain" is just an attempt of some believers to rationalize their belief in the kind of the supernatural "soul."
The brain computes an abstraction of the reality (or most likely multiple competing abstractions) and decides on actions. There's the free will.
There is some kind of idea that the consciousness "floats" on top of this abstract soup as some kind of a running program in an operative system, and is making the calls, but this is most likely not how it works.
All these abstractions of sensory input, probabilities, decisions, etc, is probably what creates the consciousnesses but I doubt that there is a meaningful boundary.
After-the-fact rationalization may be true or not - it's obvious that events can't be processed in no time at all, and that there must be some processing time for the experienced "now."
But trying to build some meaningful philosophical arguments from it is probably a red herring.
After all, when trying to explain the reasons behind a decision made without explicit reasoning and external lists of pros and cons, it's often clear that there are many "hunches" that are not easy to summarize or valuate.