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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: March 21st, 2024

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  • By decision, I meant anything that was more than mere chemical or mechanical reaction. Another way of separating it is the point where we can say there is a purpose or difference between dead molecules and being alive. In this case, going to the cinema is wayyy too advanced a decision to help define. More like a cell or group of cells that recognizes its environment and has the opportunity to decide to go towards one direction over another rather than respond merely because a chemical in their environment reacted with their body in a way that gave them an impulse.

    But in the larger picture, it seems like there are many decisions that occur for us to commit a behavior. For example, we have to decide what we perceive, decide what our emotional state is, decide what our memories are, decide our personal taste for movies, decide our current motivational state, decide if we have enough time, etc, be fore we decide to go to the movies. All those have to happen prior to deciding on the cinema, and the majority of them occur simultaneously with a central network organizing them into a coherent process, correct? Omg, is this central network what people call executive functioning‽





  • Interesting! This is what I was getting at. I’m trying to figure out at what level decisions are made and how are they made. From what I can tell so far, it seems like neurons act as nodes that either fire or not based on the information they receive from previous neurons. The information they receive from previous neurons either encourage or discourage activation, each at a different strength. Once a neuron receives enough encouragement to fire from the previous neurons, it fires and sends its signal to the neurons it is connected to, which they take as encouragement or discouragement. In a sense, decision-making is a series of very long logistic regression models. Each previous neuron serves as a predictive factor with it’s own polarity (encouragement or discouragement) and coefficient (magnitude of signal). Learning is changing the values of coefficients so that predictive factors have different impacts on the outcome variable. With this in mind, then at least 2 neurons are needed to make a decision. The more neurons, the more variables can be included in the decision making process. Does that make sense?