Cardio-Autonomic Gating of Volition: A Systems-Biological Theory of Decision Competence

Contemporary models of decision-making conceptualize choice as the outcome of neural evidence accumulation, valuation, and action selection. These approaches presuppose that the organism is continuously prepared to decide. However, no existing framework specifies the biological conditions under which neural decision mechanisms become operable. Here, I introduce Cardio-Autonomic Gating of Volition (CAGV), a systems-biological theory proposing that decision onset is initiated by transitions in cardio-autonomic regulatory state that configure the brain into a decision-competent regime. Drawing on neurocardiology, autonomic neuroscience, and interoceptive network models, the framework treats cardiac afferent signaling, baroreflex sensitivity, and autonomic flexibility as a physiological state vector governing neural gain, large-scale integration, and threshold availability across distributed decision systems. In this view, neural decision dynamics are contingent implementations enabled only within gated regulatory regimes. CAGV is explicitly distinguished from somatic marker, neurovisceral integration, embodied cognition, and readiness-potential accounts by assigning cardio-autonomic regulation a constitutive and enabling role in volition. The theory yields falsifiable predictions concerning regime-dependent decision thresholds, neural accumulation dynamics, and selective impairments of decision initiation under autonomic dysfunction. This work reframes volition as an emergent property of multi-level physiological regulation and establishes decision competence as a distinct object of scientific explanation.