Reddit mentions of How Brain Arousal Mechanisms Work: Paths Toward Consciousness

As to arguments supporting free will I will suggest based on some of the references cited below that it is very hard to support the idea that we live in a purely deterministic universe.

Based on the 'meditative perceptions' of the Buddha the concept of interdependence and non-self emerged. I interpret interdependence as emergence, and non-self as the separation of consciousness from the concept formed in the mind as self.

The perceptions arising during mediation circumvent and trump the conditioned and conceptual responses of our cortex/mind, greatly expanding the parameters of what we could consider our free will.

see also Shulman, Eviatar. Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.



A response to your comment, with some references..."I could understand that a neural network may have an internal mechanism of information flow which is so complicated that it exceeds our current level of knowledge in being able to map or understand it (the complexity of the connections create consciousness and we aren't advanced enough to understand this?).'

The efficacy of neural networks applied to AI is that the repetition of simple units or Boolean nodes-on/off, allows complexity to arise from very simple uncomplicated structures.

>This new science centers on the study of “coupled oscillators.” Groups of fireflies, planets, or pacemaker cells are all collections of oscillators—entities that cycle automatically, that repeat themselves over and over again at more or less regular time intervals. Fireflies flash; planets orbit; pacemaker cells fire. Two or more oscillators are said to be coupled if some physical or chemical process allows them to influence one another. Fireflies communicate with light. Planets tug on one another with gravity. Heart cells pass electrical currents back and forth. As these examples suggest, nature uses every available channel to allow its oscillators to talk to one another. And the result of those conversations is often synchrony, in which all the oscillators begin to move as one.

>As he considered increasingly homogeneous populations of oscillators, no sync occurred until he reached a critical point, a threshold of diversity. Then, suddenly, some of the oscillators spontaneously locked their frequencies and ran around together. As he made the distribution even narrower, more and more oscillators were co-opted into the synchronized pack. In developing this description, Winfree discovered an unexpected link between biology and physics. He realized that mutual synchronization is analogous to a phase transition, like the freezing of water into ice. Think for a moment about how astonishing the phenomenon of freezing really is. When the temperature is just 1 degree above the freezing point, water molecules roam freely, colliding and tumbling over one another. At that temperature, water is a liquid. But now cool it ever so slightly below the freezing point and suddenly, as if by magic, a new form of matter is born. Trillions of molecules spontaneously snap into formation, creating a rigid lattice, the solid crystal we call ice. Similarly, sync occurs abruptly, not gradually, as the width of the frequency distribution is lowered through the critical value.

>Strogatz, Steven H.. Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life (p. 54). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition.

To elaborate on the microbe I will refer to a description of slime mold found in 'The self-organizing Universe' by Erich Jantsch

When food is abundant there are a group of single celled organisms that go about their individual lives in the forest floor. When hard times occur these organisms start 'randomly' emitting ATP.

Suddenly populations of these organisms start to come together - 10,000 to 100,000 individuals form a worm. Cells with high cellulose form a foot, and high sugar form a mouth/head. This worms then crawls through the forest until it finds a good food source and then it dissolves and all the single cells go about their lives again. Complexity arising from the organization of the chaotic and unpredictable behavior of simpler units.

A couple more references...

>What makes the Prigoginian paradigm especially interesting is that it shifts attention to those aspects of reality that characterize today’s accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, nonlinear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences), and temporality—a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time.

> The work of Ilya Prigogine and his colleagues in the so-called “Brussels school” may well represent the next revolution in science as it enters into a new dialogue not merely with nature, but with society itself.

> The ideas of the Brussels school, based heavily on Prigogine’s work, add up to a novel, comprehensive theory of change. Summed up and simplified, they hold that while some parts of the universe may operate like machines, these are closed systems, and closed systems, at best, form only a small part of the physical universe. Most phenomena of interest to us are, in fact, open systems, exchanging energy or matter (and, one might add, information) with their environment. Surely biological and social systems are open, which means that the attempt to understand them in mechanistic terms is doomed to failure. This suggests, moreover, that most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrial, is seething and bubbling with change, disorder, and process.

>In Prigoginian terms, all systems contain subsystems, which are continually “fluctuating.” At times, a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so powerful, as a result of positive feedback, that it shatters the preexisting organization. At this revolutionary moment—the authors call it a “singular moment” or a “bifurcation point”—it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into “chaos” or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of “order” or organization, which they call a “dissipative structure.” (Such physical or chemical structures are termed dissipative because, compared with the simpler structures they replace, they require more energy to sustain them.)

>Prigogine, Ilya. Order Out of Chaos (Radical Thinkers) . Verso Books. Kindle Edition.

also

>"Biological theorists who seek to explain consciousness have gotten stuck in the cerebral cortex, citing it as the situs of consciousness, i.e., where consciousness arises. I will challenge this notion and, accordingly, offer a new theory of how we become conscious during various natural or induced states in which we are unconscious." - Pfaff, Donald. How Brain Arousal Mechanisms Work (Kindle Locations 107-110). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition. https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Arousal-Mechanisms-Work-Consciousness/dp/1108433332

and

>A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. The theory is increasingly being used to interpret and drive experimental and theoretical studies, and it is finding its way into many other domains of research on the mind. It is the theory that the brain is a sophisticated hypothesis-testing mechanism, which is constantly involved in minimizing the error of its predictions of the sensory input it receives from the world. This mechanism is meant to explain perception and action and everything mental in between. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it. It is also attractive because more and more empirical evidence is beginning to point in its favour. It has enormous unifying power and yet it can explain in detail too. This book explores this theory. It explains how the theory works and how it applies; it sets out why the theory is attractive; and it shows why and how the central ideas behind the theory profoundly change how we should conceive of perception, action, attention, and other central aspects of the mind.

>Perception, action, and attention are but three different ways of doing the very same thing. All three ways be must be balanced carefully with each other in order to get the world right. The unity of conscious perception, the nature of the self, and our knowledge of our private mental world is at heart grounded in our attempts to optimize predictions about our ongoing sensory input.

>The theory promises not only to radically reconceptualize who we are and how aspects of our mental lives fit into the world. It unifies these themes under one idea: we minimize the error between the hypotheses generated on the basis of our model of the world and the sensory deliverances coming from the world. A single type of mechanism, reiterated throughout the brain, manages everything. The mechanism uses an assortment of standard statistical tools to minimize error and in doing so gives rise to perception, action, and attention, and explains puzzling aspects of these phenomena. Though the description of the mechanism is statistical it is just a causal neuronal mechanism and the theory therefore sits well with a reductionist, materialist view of the mind.



>Hohwy, Jakob. The Predictive Mind, Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

How can free-will not exist in a brain that is constantly creating choices?