I have several issues with the ideas you present here. Of course, it's likely that it's just another communication error given our last conversation..

Here "involuntary" needs to be distinguished from "hard-to-resist". Most people do not define smoking as an involuntary behavior, because, although people may smoke even when they wish they wouldn't, they have the feeling that they could have chosen not to smoke, they just didn't.

For smoking, sure. I have a habit of twirling my hair which can be damn annoying and sometimes hard to resist. I can choose to keep myself from doing it by paying attention to what my hands are doing and forcing it to stop. If I'm concentrating on other things, it happens without me realizing it. It seems out of touch with the normal meaning of the word "voluntary" to include this.

But when our masked gunman tells me to increase my body temperature by two degrees or he'll shoot, he is out of luck.

Well, I just tried it. I got 0.6 degrees increase. If I were to put blankets on like feverish people normally do, I'm sure I could do better. If there was a real gunman, I'd start doing squat jumps. Marathon runners can get their core up to 105.

Does that mean that the process of regulating core temp both is and is not "voluntary", depending on the size of the temperature change?

If you're not willing to do the work of trying to model the hierarchical structure of the brain and the interconnections, what can this theory say about why my locus of voluntary control is bigger than it used to be? Can your black box theory advise people on how to increase their locus of control? What can you even use it for?

But an explanation in the spirit of reinforcement learning would have to start by insisting on treating thoughts and emotions as effects rather than causes. Instead of explaining my choice of restaurant by saying I thought about it and decided McDonalds was best, it would be more accurate to say that previous experiences with McDonalds caused both the thought "I should go to McDonalds" and the behavior of going to McDonalds.

What's the evolutionary purpose of thoughts if they don't do anything? Where do thoughts like "I just thought about going to McDonalds" come from? What distinguishes this from philosophical zombies?