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.)
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.)