Decision making, determinism and consciousness

Edmund Rolls

New Horizons in the Neuroscience of Consciousness – Eds – Elaine Perry, Daniel Collerton, Fiona Le Beau & Heather Ashton

In the introduction to his chapter Rolls emphasises that decision making in the brain involves a mix of the reasoning system and the reward system, the latter to a large extent meaning the same thing as our emotional response. Rolls has made an extremely valuable contribution to the understanding emotional processing in the brain and especially in the orbitofrontal cortex. Unfortunately when it comes to consciousness, Rolls seems to put himself into the dubious hands of twentieth century philosophy rather the drawing on his own much more useful findings about the emotional system. [Read more] ...