Decisions in Wetware

I spent some time editing the manuscript section talking about “Perceptual Decisions”, a terminology that doesn’t really fit in the vocabulary of standard decision theory. This mismatch drives home an idea that while Decision Theory and the brain need to solve the same problem of choosing options under conditions of uncertainty, Decision Theory is described in an abstract language of boolean algebra or set theory. The brain solves the problem in wetware, using networks of excitable cells to model the process in a language we can’t access, let alone understand.

The comparisons are fascinating at a conceptual level, but leave unsolved how to use our semantic tools to improve the functioning of the brain networks. That turns out to be the real challenge of deciding better

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