Version 4 Generalized inattentional blindness from a Global Workspace perspective

We apply Baars’ Global Workspace model of consciousness to the phenomenon of inattentional blindness, using the groupoid network method of Stewart et al. to explore modular structures defined by information measures associated with cognitive processes. Internal cross-talk between such processes breaks the fundamental groupoid symmetry, and, if sufficiently strong, creates, in a highly punctuated manner, a linked, shifting, giant component which instantiates the global workspace of consciousness. Embedding, exterior, information sources act as a kind of external field which breaks the groupoid symmetry in a somewhat different manner, defining the slowly-acting contexts of Baars theory and providing topological constraints for the manifestations of consciousness. This analysis significantly extends recent mathematical treatments of the global workspace, and identifies a shifting, topologically-determined syntactical and grammatical ‘bottleneck’ as a tunable Rate Distortion manifold which constrains what sensory or other signals can be brought to conscious attention, typically in a punctuated manner. Sensations outside the limits of that filter’s syntactically and grammatically tuned ‘bandpass’ have lower probability of detection, regardless of their structure, accounting for inattentional blindness. The fundamental empirical implication of this model is that virtually every manifestation of conscious attention should, in some measure, exhibit a form of inattentional blindness. Thus ‘residuals’ from this model across systems, i.e. variations in time, place, and manner, as it were, can provide the basis for significant new science, in the same sense that residuals from a regression model often indicate novel directions for research. The theory, based on necessary conditions imposed by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory, does not suffer the ‘sufficiency indeterminacy’ which Krebs finds inherent to neural network simulations of complicated mental processes.