Global workspace theory

And there have been different theories proposed before for like accounting for the human case.

like if you have you give somebody some anesthetic or like you wonder like are they still conscious or not kind of matters if you're if you're just having amnesia and the surgery you don't remember the pain or whether you actually didn't experience the pain seems to be like something you wouldn't want to know and so there are different theories like the global workspace theory um attention schema theory higher order well so global workspace theory is the idea that there is a sort of global computational workspace there is like our brain has different modules and processes happening but there is a shared space where they can as it were send information that then gets broadcast to a lot of other modules and that being conscious of something means for that content that information content to be present in this global workspace roughly speaking So you could be doing unconscious processing of certain material.

We do a lot of that.

Maybe most of the information processing in the human brain is unconscious, but some of it gets kind of entered into this global stage in the brain, and then it's available to all these different other modules to affect that.

So consciousness itself was just an evolutionary construct for something that we require to advance as a living

thing.

Well, I mean, obviously evolution had something to do with producing these brains that then have the global workspace.

Interestingly, one can then look for analogs to this in AIs.