Bandwidth, Vision, Speech, and Latency

Before enrolling at Texas Tech University to earn my PhD in neuroscience, I wrote a magazine article abstract and sent it to Nature Neuroscience. They turned me away but suggested other publishers, of which I reached out to a few and received generally tepid responses.

The essay attempted to take GWT (global workspace theory) and splice it with IIT (information integration theory). I’m not sure I’m ready to say that doesn’t work, but in terms of explaining the experience of consciousness I am no longer quite sure it works. Integration and the workspace are both prerequisites for consciousness, but neither really explains what it is or why it exists. The model that they support and update is what does that. We should be focusing, hard, on reasoning out exactly how it is that our minds model the world around us, if we really want to know what consciousness is.

Information integration is a conscious-underpinning process that happens basically everywhere, more or less all the time. The IIT argument re: consciousness is that the places with the most information integration occurring are the most conscious, whatever that means in a world where it must compete with enactivism and lose. GWT instead postulates that consciousness happens mainly in a few places but is largely a global phenomenon.