In this article, the concept of working memory accounts for not consciousness but the accessibility, stability and reportability of certain contents. For example, when I am reading very carefully, I may not be concentrating on the ambient sounds, my bodily position, my peripheral vision, and the environment of the room. These contents may not have to be retained in working memory in any way as relevant information for the current activity. Nevertheless, it does not necessarily follow that these are unconscious in nature. They can be part of the background of consciousness. Hence, there is the danger that the author assumes "being available for cognitive manipulation or verbal report" to be synonymous with "being conscious." This is quite an assumption and not one arrived at from the working memory model.

Should link to the original article:

https://theconversation.com/consciousness-how-working-memory...

This does not recognize the Hard Problem of Consciousness. Even if we find a mechanistic way to explain what is needed for consciousness, it does not give any clue as to why it feels like something to be conscious.

We can’t define or measure consciousness - because we haven’t discovered how.

So, we can’t define or measure it, but we can create it?

How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

> How do you create that which is not definable or measurable?

animals can have offspring without understanding reproduction

Ran a bunch of the n-back / prefrontal buffer experiments in an undergrad lab years back. Weird gotcha: capacity limit isn't fixed, it shifts with sleep debt. Makes the "workspace" theory feel less abstract, more like a resource budget.

We can create many things without being able to define them. From embryos to fire.

Consciousness is what the brain is doing.

I look forward to more precise definitions.

That's functionalist hand-waving though. Dehaene's global workspace theory ties consciousness to broadcast/access, not just "brain activity" generically. IIT makes the opposite bet, tying it to integrated information. Which computations count is exactly the open question, not a footnote.

People made fire for thousands of years before they understood what it was.

My way of reasoning on this is unscientific - but it is intuitive. It might be a starting place.

Consider physics as an analogy.

The level of detail dictates the right physics to use. Aerospace engineering can use continuous formulae to predict what’ll happen. But when you deal in a few atoms as in chip design, quantum effects dominate. Sub-atomic particles (quarks et al) are different again.

This makes deriving a universal physics elusive.

So it likely is with consciousness and how the brain achieves what it achieves.

Working memory is exactly like CPU cache. Data must be first moved to WM from mid and longterm storage in brain (RAM and SSD respectively) before being processed by the brain centres.

Consciousness is a process that runs concurrently with the main process and follows it, hence we know about our thought. In this analogy, WM and consciousness have little relation.

Brain analogies always collapse once someone brings up log files.

I agree, but attention is what is missing I think.

Consciousness is merely the awareness of existence, while attention is the process that works with the working memory.

To me, consciousness is a log file that is partially in working memory and has logged the current state of the system.

What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.

Isn't that obvious?

What we perceive as "present" is just our latest memory.

It seems to me that compaction is not unlike sleep

It does not.

Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain, temporally propagating through cognitive technology. Memory and temporal propagation (awareness) give consciousness something to do, which makes it topically interesting and addressable.

The quantum domain has a tremendous information density which scales through entanglement (by the tens of thousands or even millions in our neurons) allowing the ultra high definition holographic experience we (many of us) are familiar with.

When quantum holographic memory is understood, consciousness will be better understood. The qubit is a dead end, this will be the indicator of scientific progress.

Does living working memory bifurcate to logical and physical maps as happens to compute memory on kernel bring up after MMU and core coherence? That being the case an owl may know what it is like to be a bat.

Woo!

Do you have any references for these claims?

I’m also curious how you define consciousness.

Very interesting. Do you have any links to material along these lines?

Right, what's the actual mechanism—decoherence times in warm wet neurons are femtoseconds. If entanglement survives long enough to matter, that's testable. Has anyone measured it, or is "quantum" just standing in for "mysterious"?

> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain

[citation needed]

Global workspace theory again, Baars had this in '88. Every cycle someone renames it and bolts on new jargon. Working memory as consciousness is just cache coherence dressed up in philosophy.