What if the oracle from The Matrix was right? She said
Because you didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it. I thought you'd have figured that out by now.
The choice is already made, you only need to accept it. This is rather a philosophical conclusion, but sometimes it really feels that way, and here’s why.
I will tell you my current working hypothesis, and how decision-making is working in some sort of simple spiking neural network.
Let's say we track only inputs, environment state, action, and environment response. It will highly likely be one-to-one reinforcement learning. New actions and positive feedback will release dopamine and improve connections for decisions which leads to the result.
So what reinforcement learning is lacking? As I said it’s a simplified form. Decisions like "In what college should I go?" are based on many memories, emotions, and language-related things.
First, we must combine several sensory inputs (vision, proprioception) and indirect factors (fatigue, hunger), causing a great enthusiasm among embodiment researchers.
Second, it’s lacking memory as a concept. It only has the resulting probabilities, but it can not go through the memories again. It cannot explore associations.
So, we have receptors, actuators, a generator network, a discriminator network, and memory. Repeat all that for every different sense, and then connect them.