I am not sure how one might arrive at a judgment of good or bad purely from a cognitive exercise.
As I see it working - Anatomy of a thought
- There is some drive from the hypothalamus. As discussed above, this could be any drive, big or small, originating from any one node of the hypothalamic cluster. The voting on which drive is the most important is resolved at the hypothalamic level and is presented to the cortex as the most important thing. We really don’t multitask, but we task switch really fast.
- This drive is unwrapped in the forebrain. This demand from the subcortical structure is processed much like any sensation in any sensory input and parsed for content and resolved into cortex compatible features.
- As this is developed into a drive this could end up being a command to the body. The map contents ripple up from the lower forebrain in the general direction of the central sulcus.
- Part of what is learned by the cortex/cerebellum is what commands go where. Some do go to the body, some are directed inward to the rest of the brain. These patterns are sent as a distributed pattern to the cerebellum.
- The cerebellum has learned to take these parallel distributed patterns and turn them into sequences. Part of the input to the cerebellum is the destination of the learned sequence. The output sequence could be the body OR various parts of the sensory stream. Note that this output is the deep cortex “motor drive” axons associated with the feedback path.
- The WHAT/WHERE stream is driven with fragments of previous inputs that unfold into the stored representation to be recalled. This recall is processed through the WHAT/WHERE stream back up to the temporal lobe.
- In the temporal lobe this “experience” is processed with the same system that processes any other sensation even though it is triggered internally.
- As this ripples up the WHAT/WHERE stream the two streams (feedforward/feedback) are evaluated for a match with the unfolding need state (that hypothalamus thing again). This can trigger an AH-HA experience if a global workspace is ignited.
- If there is a match we evaluate its goodness based on the value stored with the memory.
- If it is not what we are looking for the process is repeated.
This is the core of reflective thoughts.
There may be stuff in the cortex but the cerebellum is the driver of the search engine and the weighted contents (search termination) is the GW ignition based on these recalled contents. Notice that much of this process is both initiated by structure outside the cortex and supervised by the lizard brain.
I have no idea how you think a non-lizard brain engine is supposed to work but I think it would end up having the same limitations that is commonly associated with the current AI projects - no common sense. The weighting that the limbic system adds to every episodic memory gives an automatic cue if something is a good idea - there is no need to try and figure it out in every situation from first principles.