A very common suggestion on the distinctive property of conscious, personal-level representations is that they are available in a “central workspace” in the mind/brain, which is thought to be an area across which the different specialist sensory and conceptual systems that are assumed to make up the mind can communicate and broadcast their outputs (Baar 1988; Block 1995; Carruthers 2015). Any information that is broadcast in the workspace is automatically globally available to all systems that are connected to the workspace. The thought is that information that is thus globally available is conscious, personal-level information, and vice versa (Dehaene and Changeux 2011). Is that true?
In an interesting paper, Tim Bayne (2011) suggests that a particular pathological condition, absence seizure, poses a problem for this view. Absence seizure is a disturbance of brain function (due to abnormal electrical activity in the brain) that involves staring spells that typically occur right after the patient suddenly stops, e.g., walking, or talking in mid-sentences etc., and usually last for less than 15 seconds.
Studies with absence seizure patients suggest that during the seizure these subjects process information at the conscious level, e.g., they may recall what they’ve been asked during the seizure and even respond to questions during the episode. Yet, they are at that moment unable to use the information processed to execute simple motor commands, e.g., to close the eyes (Gloor 1986). Bayne holds that the “cognitive selectivity seen in absence seizures poses a challenge” to “global workspace models” of consciousness, for “patients appear to have representations whose contents are available to some forms of executive control but not others. In other words, in such patient the global workspace seems to be ‘partial’ and ‘fragmented’ rather than fully ‘global’” (2011: 50).
However, Bayne seems to overlook that even if only a selected few systems connected to the workspace do in fact process some piece of the information during an episode of absence seizure, this is compatible with that information also being available to all other systems connected to the workspace. For clearly, the selective impairments might be due to a failure in the consuming systems rather than the result of an only “partial” or “fragmented” workspace.
There are, however, other considerations for being skeptical of the proposal that personal-level representations have the distinctive feature of being globally broadcast. For there is some evidence suggesting the existence of unconscious or implicit working memory in which information of which the subject isn’t consciously aware is processed in ways that suggests the information is widely available (e.g., Sotto et al. 2011; Hassin et al. 2009). Research on the effects of subliminal priming on control processes, affect, volition attribution, choices, and political behavior too indicates that subliminal, i.e., unconscious information can receive a pretty wide audience in the minds, which again suggests that wide, perhaps global broadcasting might not be a distinctive feature of conscious, personal-level representations (Hassin 2013).
