To illustrate my reservations: soon after I read the sentence about GNW meaning you can only be conscious of one thing at a time, as I was considering that proposition, I felt my chin was a little itchy and so I scratched it. So now I can remember thinking about the proposition while simultaneously scratching my chin. Trying to recall exactly what I was thinking at the time now also brings up a feeling of a specific body posture.
To me, “thinking about the proposition while simultaneously scratching my chin” sounds like a separate “thing” (complex representation formed in the GNW) than either “think about proposition” or “scratch my chin”… and you experienced this thing after the other ones, right? Like, from the way you described it, it sounds to me like there was actually 1) the proposition 2) the itch 3) the output of a ‘summarizer’ that effectively says “just now, I was considering this proposition and scratching my chin”. [I guess, in this sense, I would say you are ordinarily doing some “weird self-deceptive dance” that prevents you from noticing this, because most people seem to ordinarily experience “themselves” as the locus of/basis for experience, instead of there being a stream of moments of consciousness, some of which apparently refer to an ‘I’.]
Also, I have this sense that you’re chunking your experience into “things” based on what your metacognitive summarizer-of-mental-activity is outputting back to the workspace, but there are at least 10 representations streaming through the workspace each second, and many of these will be far more primitive than any of the “things” we’ve already mentioned here (or than would ordinarily be noticed by the summarizer without specific training for it, e.g. in meditation). Like, in your example, there were visual sensations from the reading, mental analyses about its content, the original raw sensation of the itch, the labeling of it as “itchy,” the intention to scratch the itch, (definitely lots more...), and, eventually, the thought “I remember thinking about this proposition and scratching my chin ‘at the same time’.”
Good points, thanks for the elaboration. I agree it could also be the case that integrating thoughts with different locations of origin only happens by broadcasting both separately and then only later synthesizing them with some third mechanism (is this something we can probe by having someone multitask in an fMRI and looking for rapid strobe-light alternations of [e.g.] “count to 10”-related and “do the hand jive”-related activations?).
In a modus ponens / modus tollens sort of way, such a non-synthesizing GNW would be less useful to understanding consciousness than one with more shades of grey—it would reduce the long-range correlations to mere message-passing. If in this picture most of my verbal reasoning is localized rather than broadcast, but then it eventually gets used by the rest of my brain and stored in memory, I have absolutely no problem with saying I was doing verbal reasoning and it was conscious, with no equivocations about “but only when the strobe light was on.” (Obviously this is related to a Multiple Drafts model of consciousness.)
To me, “thinking about the proposition while simultaneously scratching my chin” sounds like a separate “thing” (complex representation formed in the GNW) than either “think about proposition” or “scratch my chin”… and you experienced this thing after the other ones, right? Like, from the way you described it, it sounds to me like there was actually 1) the proposition 2) the itch 3) the output of a ‘summarizer’ that effectively says “just now, I was considering this proposition and scratching my chin”. [I guess, in this sense, I would say you are ordinarily doing some “weird self-deceptive dance” that prevents you from noticing this, because most people seem to ordinarily experience “themselves” as the locus of/basis for experience, instead of there being a stream of moments of consciousness, some of which apparently refer to an ‘I’.]
Also, I have this sense that you’re chunking your experience into “things” based on what your metacognitive summarizer-of-mental-activity is outputting back to the workspace, but there are at least 10 representations streaming through the workspace each second, and many of these will be far more primitive than any of the “things” we’ve already mentioned here (or than would ordinarily be noticed by the summarizer without specific training for it, e.g. in meditation). Like, in your example, there were visual sensations from the reading, mental analyses about its content, the original raw sensation of the itch, the labeling of it as “itchy,” the intention to scratch the itch, (definitely lots more...), and, eventually, the thought “I remember thinking about this proposition and scratching my chin ‘at the same time’.”
Good points, thanks for the elaboration. I agree it could also be the case that integrating thoughts with different locations of origin only happens by broadcasting both separately and then only later synthesizing them with some third mechanism (is this something we can probe by having someone multitask in an fMRI and looking for rapid strobe-light alternations of [e.g.] “count to 10”-related and “do the hand jive”-related activations?).
In a modus ponens / modus tollens sort of way, such a non-synthesizing GNW would be less useful to understanding consciousness than one with more shades of grey—it would reduce the long-range correlations to mere message-passing. If in this picture most of my verbal reasoning is localized rather than broadcast, but then it eventually gets used by the rest of my brain and stored in memory, I have absolutely no problem with saying I was doing verbal reasoning and it was conscious, with no equivocations about “but only when the strobe light was on.” (Obviously this is related to a Multiple Drafts model of consciousness.)