even slower-changing factors such as cultural structure, em-
bedding patterns of psychosocial stress, the legacy of personal
developmental and community history, and so on.
Such analysis is consistent with, but clearly extends, the
‘standard model’ of global workspace theory.
We are suggesting, ultimately, that culture, developmental
history, and structured stress serve as essential contexts-of-
context, in the sense of Baars and Franklin (2003), defining
a further hierarchy of externally-imposed constraints to the
functioning of individual consciousness.
Discussion and conclusions
We have constructed a punctuated information-dynamic
global neuronal workspace model which incorporates a
second-order and similarly punctuated universality class tun-
ing linked to detection of structured external signals. Tuning
the punctuated activation of attention to those signals per-
mits more rapid and appropriate response, but at increased
physiological or other opportunity cost: unconscious process-
ing is clearly more efficient, if the organism can get away with
it. On the other hand, if the organism can’t get away with it,
death is more likely, suggesting a strong evolutionary imper-
ative for a dynamic global neural workspace.
Linkage across individual dynamic workspaces - i.e. human
hypersociality in the context of an embedding epigenetic cul-
tural inheritance system - would be even more adaptationally
efficient. Indeed, equations (24), (25), and (26) suggest the
possibility of very strong linkage of individual consciousness
and physiology to embedding sociocultural network phenom-
ena, ultimately producing an extended model of consciousness
which does not fall victim to the mereological fallacy.
In just this regard Nisbett et al. (2001) review an extensive
literature on empirical studies of basic cognitive differences
between individuals raised in what they call ‘East Asian’ and
‘Western’ cultural heritages, which they characterize, respec-
tively, as ‘holistic’ and ‘analytic’. They find:
1. Social organization directs attention to some aspects of
the perceptual field at the expense of others.
2. What is attended to influences metaphysics.
3. Metaphysics guides tacit epistemology, that is, beliefs
about the nature of the world and causality.
4. Epistemology dictates the development and application
of some cognitive processes at the expense of others.
5. Social organization can directly affect the plausibility of
metaphysical assumptions, such as whether causality should
be regarded as residing in the field vs. in the object.
6. Social organization and social practice can directly in-
fluence the development and use of cognitive processes such
as dialectical vs. logical ones.
Nisbett et al. (2001) conclude that tools of thought em-
body a culture’s intellectual history, that tools have theories
built into them, and that users accept these theories, albeit
unknowingly, when they use these tools.
Individual consciousness - currently defined in terms of
the dynamic global neuronal workspace - appears to be pro-
foundly affected by cultural, and perhaps developmental, con-
text, and, we aver, by patterns of embedding psychosocial
stress, all matters subject to a direct empirical study which
may lead to an extension of the concept particularly which
will clearly be useful in understanding certain forms of psy-
chopathology.
From even limited theoretical perspectives, current dy-
namic systems models of neural networks, or their computer
simulations, simply do not reflect the imperatives of Adams’
(2003) informational turn in philosophy. On the other hand,
dynamic systems models based on differential equations, or
their difference equation realizations on computers, have a
history of intense and continuous intellectual development go-
ing back to Isaac Newton. Hence very little new mathematics
needs to be done, and one can look up most required results
in the textbooks, which are quite sophisticated by now. By
contrast, rigorous probability theory is perhaps a hundred
years old, and its information theory subset has seen barely a
half century. Consequently the mathematics can’t always be
looked up, and sometimes must even be created de novo, at
no small difficulty. One is reminded, not originally, of a drunk
looking for his lost car keys under a street lamp ‘because the
light is better here’.
Nisbett’s caution that tools of thought embody a cultural
history whose built-in theories users implicitly adopt is no
small matter: dynamical systems theory carries with it more
than just a whiff of the 18th Century mechanical clock, while
statistical mechanics models of neural networks cannot pro-
vide natural linkage with the sociocultural contexts which
carry the all-important human epigenetic system of heritage.
Most current applications of information theory to the dy-
namic global neuronal workspace, however, appear to have
strayed far indeed from the draconian structural discipline
imposed by the asymptotic limit theorems of the subject. In-
formation measures are of relatively little interest in and of
themselves, serving primarily as grist for the mills of split-
ting criteria between high and low probability sets of dynamic
paths. This is the central mechanism whose extension, using
a homology with free energy density, permits exploration of
punctuated neural dynamics in a manner consistent with the
program described by Adams (2003).
According to the mathematical ecologist E.C. Pielou (1976,
p.106), the legitimate purpose of mathematical models is to
raise questions for empirical study, not to answer them, or,
as one wag put it, “all models are wrong, but some models
are useful”. The natural emergence of tunable punctuated
dynamics in our treatment, albeit at the expense of elabo-
rate renormalization calculations at transition, and general-
ized Onsager relations away from it, suggests the possible util-
ity of the theory in future empirical studies of consciousness:
the car keys really may have been lost in the dark parking lot
down the street, but here is a new flashlight.
We have outlined an empirically-testable approach to mod-
eling consciousness which returns with a resounding thump
to the classic asymptotic limit theorems of communication
theory, and suggests further the necessity of incorporating
the effects of embedding structures of psychosocial stress and
culture. The theory suffers from a painful grandiosity, claim-
ing to incorporate matters of cognition, consciousness, social
system, and culture into a single all-encompassing model. To
quote from a recent review of Bennett and Hacker’s new book,
(Patterson, 2003), however, contemporary neuroscience itself
may suffer a more pernicious and deadly form of that disorder
for which our approach is, in fact, the antidote:
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