Consciousness: A Simple Information Theory Global Workspace Model

The asymptotic limit theorems of information theory permit a concise formulation of Bernard Baars' global workspace/global broadcast picture of consciousness, focusing on how networks of unconscious cognitive modules are driven by the classic 'no free lunch' argument into shifting, tunable, alliances having variable thresholds for signal detection. The model directly accounts for the punctuated characteristics of many conscious phenomena, and derives the inherent necessity of inattentional blindness and related effects

Consciousness, cognition, and the hierarchy of context: extending the global neuronal workspace model

We adapt an information theory analysis of interacting cognitive biological and social modules to the problem of the global neuronal workspace, the new standard neuroscience paradigm for consciousness. Tunable punctuation emerges in a natural way, suggesting the possibility of fitting appropriate phase transition power law, and away from transition, generalized Onsager relation expressions, to observational data on conscious reaction. The development can be extended in a straightforward manner to include psychosocial stress, culture, or other cognitive modules which constitute a structured, embedding hierarchy of contextual constraints acting at a slower rate than neuronal function itself. This produces a 'biopsychosociocultural' model of individual consciousness that, while otherwise quite close to the standard treatment, meets compelling philosophical and other objections to brain-only descriptions

Extending Astrobiology: Consciousness and Culture

The Stanley Miller experiment suggests that amino acid-based life is ubiquitous in our universe, although its varieties are not likely to have followed the particular, highly contingent and path-dependent, evolutionary trajectory found on Earth. Are many alien organisms likely to be conscious in ways that we would recognize? Almost certainly. Will some develop high order technology? Less likely, but still fairly probable. If so, will we be able to communicate with them? Only on a basic level, and only with profound difficulty. The argument is fairly direct

Machine Hyperconsciousness

Individual animal consciousness appears limited to a single giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a shifting, highly tunable, Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, can support several, often many, such giant components simultaneously, although they generally function far more slowly than the minds of the individuals who compose them. Machines having multiple global workspaces -- hyperconscious machines -- should, however, be able to operate at the few hundred milliseconds characteistic of individual consciousness. Such multitasking -- machine or institutional -- while clearly limiting the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, does not eliminate it, and introduces characteristic failure modes involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. This suggests that machines explicitly designed along these principles, while highly efficient at certain sets of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns analogous to, but more complicated than, those explored in Wallace (2006a). By contrast, institutions, facing similar challenges, are usually deeply embedded in a highly stabilizing cultural matrix of law, custom, and tradition which has evolved over many centuries. Parallel development of analogous engineering strategies, directed toward ensuring an 'ethical' device, would seem requisite to the sucessful application of any form of hyperconscious machine technology

When Spandrels Become Arches: Neural crosstalk and the evolution of consciousness

Once cognition is recognized as having a 'dual' information source, the information theory chain rule implies that isolating coresident information sources from crosstalk requires more metabolic free energy than permitting correlation. This provides conditions for an evolutionary exaptation leading to the rapid, shifting global neural broadcasts of consciousness. The argument is quite analogous to the well-studied exaptation of noise to trigger stochastic resonance amplification in neurons and neuronal subsystems. Astrobiological implications are obvious

Darwin's Rainbow: Evolutionary radiation and the spectrum of consciousness

Evolution is littered with paraphyletic convergences: many roads lead to functional Romes. We propose here another example - an equivalence class structure factoring the broad realm of possible realizations of the Baars Global Workspace consciousness model. The construction suggests many different physiological systems can support rapidly shifting, sometimes highly tunable, temporary assemblages of interacting unconscious cognitive modules. The discovery implies various animal taxa exhibiting behaviors we broadly recognize as conscious are, in fact, simply expressing different forms of the same underlying phenomenon. Mathematically, we find much slower, and even multiple simultaneous, versions of the basic structure can operate over very long timescales, a kind of paraconsciousness often ascribed to group phenomena. The variety of possibilities, a veritable rainbow, suggests minds today may be only a small surviving fraction of ancient evolutionary radiations - bush phylogenies of consciousness and paraconsciousness. Under this scenario, the resulting diversity was subsequently pruned by selection and chance extinction. Though few traces of the radiation may be found in the direct fossil record, exaptations and vestiges are scattered across the living mind. Humans, for instance, display an uncommonly profound synergism between individual consciousness and their embedding cultural heritages, enabling efficient Lamarkian adaptation

Biologically inspired distributed machine cognition: a new formal approach to hyperparallel computation

The irresistable march toward multiple-core chip technology presents currently intractable pdrogramming challenges. High level mental processes in many animals, and their analogs for social structures, appear similarly massively parallel, and recent mathematical models addressing them may be adaptable to the multi-core programming problem

Institutional paraconsciousness and its pathologies

This analysis extends a recent mathematical treatment of the Baars consciousness model to analogous, but far more complicated, phenomena of institutional cognition. Individual consciousness is limited to a single, tunable, giant component of interacting cognitive modules, instantiating a Global Workspace. Human institutions, by contrast, support several, sometimes many, such giant components simultaneously, although their behavior remains constrained to a topology generated by cultural context and by the path-dependence inherent to organizational history. Such highly parallel multitasking - institutional paraconsciousness - while clearly limiting inattentional blindness and the consequences of failures within individual workspaces, does not eliminate them, and introduces new characteristic dysfunctions involving the distortion of information sent between global workspaces. Consequently, organizations (or machines designed along these principles), while highly efficient at certain kinds of tasks, remain subject to canonical and idiosyncratic failure patterns similar to, but more complicated than, those afflicting individuals. Remediation is complicated by the manner in which pathogenic externalities can write images of themselves on both institutional function and therapeutic intervention, in the context of relentless market selection pressures. The approach is broadly consonant with recent work on collective efficacy, collective consciousness, and distributed cognition

Entering the blackboard jungle: canonical dysfunction in conscious machines

The central paradigm of Artificial Intelligence is rapidly shifting toward biological models for both robotic devices and systems performing such critical tasks as network management and process control. Here we apply recent mathematical analysis of the necessary conditions for consciousness in humans in an attempt to gain some understanding of the likely canonical failure modes inherent to a broad class of global workspace/blackboard machines designed to emulate biological functions. Similar problems are likely to confront other possible architectures, although their mathematical description may be far less straightforward

Culture and generalized inattentional blindness

A recent mathematical treatment of Baars' Global Workspace consciousness model, much in the spirit of Dretske's communication theory analysis of high level mental function, is used to study the effects of embedding cultural heritage on a generalized form of inattentional blindness. Culture should express itself quite distinctly in this basic psychophysical phenomenon, acting across a variety of sensory and other modalities, because the limited syntactic and grammatical 'bandpass' of the topological rate distortion manifold characterizing conscious attention is itself strongly sculpted by the constraints of cultural context