Determinism

[Bitking]

@Falco

Now, I understand that you have another definition of free will. What I call the illusion of free will, you call the full-blown free will. It’s a slightly different definition than @Paul_Lamb’s definition, and an even slightly bigger different definition than @Oren’s. But it is radically different than my definition of free will. It’s the complete opposite.

Rather than to beat a dead horse about what “free will” might mean I would like to go in a different direction; we know that mammals decide things - how does this decision process work?

I have pointed to my “loop of consciousness here” and this is mostly a cortical construction. Your response made it sound like you get my basic idea of how consciousness works. This really is a happy side-effect of having a cortex. I don’t think that lizards have this feature. But they do make decisions and initiate actions…

So how do decisions work?

Paul and myself have hinted that there is something going on outside the cortex without offering much of an explanation. Its time to address that head on. I call this my dumb-boss/smart-advisor model.

If you really think about the cortex it does not “initiate” action; It takes an input and processes it to an output; this is essentially a passive process. In the HTM/Cortical column model the mini-column has an input field that is processed to an action potential on an output axon. It may signal surprise or perform some transformation of the data but it does not start anything by itself.

I repeat - the cortex does not initiate action. If you are thinking of making an AI some mechanism outside of the cortex will have to drive the cortex into activity. For all the cortex snobs - if you think that this is wrong feel free to point at any part of the cortex that does initiate action.

The input might be senses or a command from sub-cortical structures.

• From the sensory end the cortex serves to analyze these senses with the process ending up in the temporal lobe. The final stages of this analysis ends up passing these perceptions to the Entorhinal Cortex & Hippocampus and through that - to the amygdala.
• The perception streams filters through to the lizard brain (thalamus nucleus clusters) and re-emerges as commands to various parts of the forebrain. These primitive commands end up being elaborated into motor programs in the forebrain. Some of this is injected back into the sensory stream; we loosely call this motor activation of the memory in the cortex “thinking.”

One notable example of this motor activation is the frontal eye fields that forces the eyes to look at things the sub-cortical structures finds interesting. You look and analyze because your lizard brain wants to look. The lizard brain has already sampled the visual stream as it passed through the sub-cortical structures and decided that there are things it want to know more about.

Thoughts on multiple pathways for sensory input into the neocortex

It seems to be a thing for connectome/cortex researchers to ignore the processing that goes on in the “lower” brain structures. These were/are sufficient to run lizards and amphibians. There is absolutely no reason to think that they re not performing much of their original functions inside of the functioning brain. The lower brain receives a low-resolution image from the eye area “away” from the fovea and directs the eye to point at interesting areas to form identification of an object with a …

I have been posting about the relationship between the cortex and sub-cortical structures on this forum for a while now.

HTM and Negative Reinforcement

I agree that the executive function to “drive” the HTM will come from the limbic structures. The division of labor is not as clear. The model I have at this point is a really stupid boss (the limbic system) with a really smart advisor (the neocortex) presenting very simplified choices for the boss to pick from. The boss, in turn, initiates an action which is elaborated and executed in the Neocortex. I take it as a matter of faith that there must be activity in the cortex to enter consciousnes…

How does this special relationship start out and evolve?

Temporal unfolding of sequences

As far as what starts a motor action - I see the need to look at this from a system point of view. In the beginning the lizard brain explores the body through babbling in all the motor circuits. As this process continues the cortex learns the most direct connections to the somatic cortex. As time goes on maps between the motor and the sensory cortex starts to fill in with learned patterns. Later, when we have explored and learned the world, we sense more of the world and this activation diff…

You will have to click-through this to see the nested links.

Universal Encoder

This sounds like an excellent analysis project. I have been thinking about three different lines that may give you some things to think about. I think think that at the most basic level the older brain structures are the initiating force that drives behavior. A baby is mostly a bundle of uncoordinated instincts that drive actions before the cortex is trained to deal with the world. As the encoding/learning progresses islands of learning form in the various maps and are refined as you conti…

I think that if you get though all this you will see the basic mechanism of the interplay between the perceiving cortex and the deciding lizard brain. This “evolutionary older” lizard brain does make decisions and the cortex is dragged along as an observer. This lizard has a very smart advisor to supply it with well-learned world facts but it gets a highly digested version of the world augmented with episodic memory to consider. This emotioinally flavored memory gives the lizard brain some very strong advise about what is a good or bad action; the lizard still decides and initiates action.