No brain, no electrochemical brain activity.
No electrochemical brain activity, no consciousness, no mind and no volitional movement, no lifting of arms, no walking, eating, thinking or doing.
Volition - the cognitive process by which an organism decides on and commits to a particular course of action
Clinical Neurophysiology , Volume 118 , Issue 6 , Pages 1179 - 1192
M . Hallett
Abstract
This review deals with the physiology of the initiation of a voluntary movement and the appreciation of whether it is voluntary or not. I argue that free will is not a driving force for movement, but a conscious awareness concerning the nature of the movement. Movement initiation and the perception of willing the movement can be separately manipulated. Movement is generated subconsciously, and the conscious sense of volition comes later, but the exact time of this event is difficult to assess because of the potentially illusory nature of introspection. Neurological disorders of volition are also reviewed. The evidence suggests that movement is initiated in the frontal lobe, particularly the mesial areas, and the sense of volition arises as the result of a corollary discharge likely involving multiple areas with reciprocal connections including those in the parietal lobe and insular cortex.
Quote;
''Finally, we derived an expression for the variance of the neural spike count that leads to a stable propagation of signal and noise in networks of neurons---that is, conditions that do not impose an accumulation or diminution of noise. The solution implies that single neurons perform simple algebra resembling averaging, and that more sophisticated computations arise by virtue of the anatomical convergence of novel combinations of inputs to the cortical column from external sources.''
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Subjects in this test performed exactly as if their brains were subconsciously gathering information before reaching a confidence threshold, which was then reported to the conscious mind as a definite, sure answer. The subjects, however, were never aware of the complex computations going on
