Human-Centric Decision Making in an Age of Formal Systems - Preprint

This paper contrasts human decision making with automated decision procedures by focusing on how habits and choices are formed and stabilized in practice. After specifying the structure of a decision problem, it develops a conceptual synthesis between Peter Naur’s Synapse-State Theory and António Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis. Read together, these accounts suggest that human decision making is qualitatively adaptive and embodied: it relies on evolving internal states and affect-laden markers that guide attention, learning, and action selection, rather than on explicit rule execution alone. The synthesis clarifies why attempts to fully formalize decision making in computational systems tend to omit key mechanisms involved in habit formation and value-sensitive choice. A short illustrative exercise is included as a compact demonstration of the proposed perspective.