Noise in the brain, decision-making, determinism, free will, and consciousness
Noise caused by randomness in the spiking times of neurons in the brain has a number of advantages, including contributing to probabilistic decision-making. However, noise results in the brain operating effectively as a non-deterministic system, which has implications for free will. Noise also results in decisions being taken probabilistically between the reasoning system and the implicit reward system. I propose that free will can be used to describe the operation of the reasoning system, and that consciousness is a property of a reasoning system that must use higher order syntactic thoughts (HOSTs) to correct its first order thoughts. When the implicit system takes a decision, we may confabulate a reason for the decision, and in that case the feeling of free will may be an illusion.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Rolls, Edmund T.
2020.
Neural Computations Underlying Phenomenal Consciousness: A Higher Order Syntactic Thought Theory.
Frontiers in Psychology 11
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Rolls, Edmund T.
2023.
Emotion, motivation, decision-making, the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and the amygdala.
Brain Structure and Function 228:5
► pp. 1201 ff.
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Rolls, Edmund T.
2023.
Brain Computations and Connectivity,
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