A lot of results points to consciousness having no input in decision making process at all, it merely receives data and builds narrative to legitimize itself.
Edit:
holy crap I had a revelation (that a lot of people probably already had before). Consciousness is lagging after actual decision making process (sometimes up to 150ms according to some studies). What if consciousness is an additional layer of back propagation mechanism for our brain? Analyse the decision post facto taking bigger picture into account, make corrective action if bad outcome. Its just a small process governing a bunch of primitive NNs.
Definitely, to my mind. It's not exactly error correction, it's comparison of two results, expectation (from emulation circuitry) vs "reality" as (measured by sensory feedback).
Incidentally, these circuits are chaotic. They are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. These conditions are in part the output of other circuits, which are chaotic themselves. The circuits can be trained to perform better and better, by constantly comparing actual performance to emulated performance. However they will rapidly degrade. This is why even top athletes benefit from warming up before competition: training their circuits to reach maximum performance, because they will have degraded overnight. That degradation may be marginal, but at elite sports level those margins make all the difference. The best athletes are able to train their physical circuitry as well as their emotional and cognitive circuitry.
The central nervous system contains emulators (already suspected by some researchers). Sensory feedback after completion of a goal-driven task is compared against output from an emulator that has been asked to complete the same task, in parallel The emulator runs faster, partly because the circuitry will simply be shorter.
This is suspected in musculoskeletal control, and I believe it may happen outside the musculoskeletal domain too.
Consciousness may only lag behind the emulator, not the "real world" sensory feedback.
This may offer a counter, or adjunct, to the proposal that consciousness is simply the brain experiencing itself.
The lag may be back propagation. It certainly seems to be some sort of computational overhead.
How do you emulate liking someone? or deciding on a number? picking color? This is the type of stuff conciousness lags behind. It doesnt drive the decision process, it is merely informed after the fact and tries to justify it to avoid any potential cognitive dissonance.
-of course I like her because Im into big butts, and 3 is totally my lucky number!
Edit:
holy crap I had a revelation (that a lot of people probably already had before). Consciousness is lagging after actual decision making process (sometimes up to 150ms according to some studies). What if consciousness is an additional layer of back propagation mechanism for our brain? Analyse the decision post facto taking bigger picture into account, make corrective action if bad outcome. Its just a small process governing a bunch of primitive NNs.