WILLPOWER AND THE DECISION-MAKING PROCESS

1. Evolutionary psychology and willpower

The fourth online book of the Global Cognitive Theory is dedicated to the will, decision-making process, and artificial intelligence.

This decision-making process of willpower does not appear in the functional flow-chart of the brain because it has been studied with a different focus. From this point, I thought it would be interesting to take a much more philosophical approach than taken with previous cognitive aspects of the brain.

The most relevant aspects analyzed in this book about willpower are the following:

• The origin of ideas and thoughts.

• The brain intervenes in decision-making processes but our body's cells surely get involved as well; it is as if it were autonomous expression of willpower by means of a system of decision like a real political system.

• This vision of the decision-making model together with its sensitivity offers reasonable explanations as to the changes observed in personal decisions without an apparent cause, and to a certain extent, to problems that arise, such as schizophrenia.

• This philosophical perspective has allowed me to perform entertaining and curious analyses about the very existence in the sense of existing as a unique individual, like a system of vital impulse from more elemental individuals, such as the vital impulse of a more global collectivity or the mentioned alternating existences throughout time. All of this according to the expression of willpower or the existence of an emotion.

• Using the discussion about the active subject of will in decision-making processes, a definition of artificial intelligence is proposed; it takes a little from all the ideas considered about 'natural' cerebral functions.

The section of related links includes the four online books of the Global Cognitive Theory:

• The brain and modern computers.
• Intelligence, intuition and creativity.
• Memory, language and other brain abilities.
• The will, decision making process and artificial intelligence.

Another related link is referred to the online book of the Global Theory of the Conditional Evolution of Life.

There is also a link to the on-line book of the Global Scientific Method and the philosophy of science. It includes the design of new scientific methods and the classification of the stages and steps of the scientific method; understanding the scientific method in the broad sense as the application of logic to the generation of common knowledge with a high level of reliability.

The scientific method works fine in general, but it works much better in its developmental phase than in its phase of general acceptance. All types of social interests affect the last phase, from the realm of sociology as in the case of Darwin’s theory, to the technician nature as in the case of the Theory of Relativity.

The last item of the related links is The EDI Study about Evolution and Design of Intelligence, a complete statistical survey on the heritability of intelligence performed on the fieldwork database of the Young Adulthood Study, 1939-1967

This statistical study is an empirical research about some considerations of the Global Cognitive Theory related with the brain and evolution, in particular the definition of intelligence.

The results of the statistical survey The EDI Study regarding an elegant intelligence show some important considerations:

• The hereditary nature of relational intelligence is confirmed.

• The genetic information with less intellectual potential is the significant one, as the GTCEL states regarding the concept of conditional intelligence.

• Likewise, it seems that the main functions of intelligence, or those evolving faster, are fairly concentrated in only one chromosome.

• The most innovative element of this work on cognitive psychology is undoubtedly the section relating to simulation. This section contains the explanation of how the artificial intelligence quotient vectors are generated by using the previsions of the new theory of evolution; they practically behave like the variables that were actually observed, in despite of the intrinsic complexity involved.

• As if that were not enough, with the due caution this subject deserves, the existence of a finalistic or teleological evolution is scientifically proven to agree with that indicated by the General Theory of Conditional Evolution of Life.

Given that the current results in this book suggest a fairly radical change from the common opinions held by the majority of the scientific community and society, the logical deduction is that more extensive studies on cognitive psychology using the same methodology need to be performed.

An example of further exploration of this study is found in the section that has been added subsequently, which is related to partner choice and intelligence. In this section a hypothesis regarding a concrete requisite of the acceptable limit of the difference in intelligence when forming a couple, is confirmed and simultaneously reinforces the model's overall coherence. In fact, the requirement refers to the unconscious choice of an unknown intelligence for current cognitive psychology.