Nick Weiler from Stanford has written a great summary describing how modern neuroscience thinks about the “canonical cortical circuit” and how recent results from Randy Bruno’s lab at Columbia provide some slight modifications to the traditional view.

Scott Aaronson has an interesting new essay online about whether there is a notion of ‘free will’ compatible with modern physics. The argument has a couple of key elements:

• change the problem: Aaronson actually analyzes the question of whether an individual’s behavior is predictable in principle, given sufficent information about the individuals brain.
• Aaronson distinguishes between “garden-variety” probablistic uncertainty in future outcomes, versus fundamental inability to induce a meaningful distribution over possible future outcomes (what he calls Knightian uncertainty).
• free-bits: Aaronson’s term for influences (e.g. photons) from the early universe that have avoided any interactions that would render their state knowable even without direct observation, and are therefore a source of true uncertainty in predicting the future course of the universe (at least at the quantum scale).

Aaronson seems to conclude that free-bits offer likely the only route by which human behavior is in principle unpredictable. (Of course in practice there are many technical difficulties, but thats not the issue). Entertaining stuff!