Necessary GMW components for conscious access

Determine which components of the Global Mediation Workspace signature, or which combinations of receive capacity, send capacity, input–output alignment, effective dimensionality, and routed source–target breadth, are necessary for conscious access.

Background

The Global Mediation Workspace (GMW) decomposes candidate-subnetwork function into several dynamical properties rather than defining consciousness through a single scalar. These properties include potential receive/send capacity, realized input–output alignment, the effective number of mediation modes, and the breadth of routed source–target transformations.

The paper explicitly leaves unresolved which of these properties are required for conscious access. The question is intended to be addressed empirically using paradigms such as masking, attentional blink, no-report experiments, perturbational studies, and state transitions.

References

No single component is stipulated to be the defining property of consciousness. Which components, or combinations of components, are necessary for conscious access remains an empirical question.

— A Control-Theoretic Formulation of Global Workspace Theory  (2608.15926 - Kanai, 16 Aug 2026) in Abstract; Section 1; Section 3

These omissions leave an empirical question. Global workspace theory does not by itself determine whether conscious access depends most strongly on receive capacity, send capacity, alignment, effective dimensionality, routed breadth, or a particular conjunction.

— A Control-Theoretic Formulation of Global Workspace Theory  (2608.15926 - Kanai, 16 Aug 2026) in Section 8.4, “What the present formulation does not yet explain”

For this reason, the four-component signature remains the primary result and WMI should be used only within a prespecified analysis design. Determining which scalarization, if any, best predicts conscious access is left open.

— A Control-Theoretic Formulation of Global Workspace Theory  (2608.15926 - Kanai, 16 Aug 2026) in Appendix, Section “Normalization, horizon, recurrence, and candidate size,” subsection “Module partition and scalarization”