The temporality of consciousness: Computational principles of a single information integration-propagation process (I2P2)

Abstract

Time plays a central role in consciousness. A crucial question is the following: Why Consciousness takes time? We suggest the contents of consciousness could emerge as the result of global competition biased by top-down (intentional) modulation, which implements global constraint satisfaction. In our simplified conceptual framework, the information integration and the consciousness are not implemented by separate processes but are unified through the idea that a network arrives at an interpretation of the input by converging towards a dynamical state, i.e. a recurring pattern related to the existence of a stable travelling wave. The synfire propagation can be recasted in this framework as a particular instance of conscious computation where (i) the network has a specialized topology (a chain of connected pools) and (ii) the sequence of spikes converge towards a synchronous spike volley. The framework we suggest has interesting connections with the neural processing proposed by Hopfield (1982) where the computation is achieved through the convergence of the dynamical system describing the neural network towards a fixed point. Here the attractors are correlated activities (or spatiotemporal periodic travelling waves) and the idea of associative memory can be generalized in this context.